Contemporary Christologies

A Fortress Introduction

Don Schweitzer

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780800664633
• eBook ISBN: 9781451406924
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

CHAPTER 1

Jesus as Revealer

Karl Rahner, Dorothee Soelle, Roger Haight

As Western societies became increasingly secularized in the twentieth century, the existence of God ceased to be a basic assumption for many people. Experiences of the absence or “eclipse” of God became an important theme in Western thought.¹ This was partly caused by a major change in the way reality was viewed in Western societies.² In the premodern thought of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Julian of Norwich, and Aquinas, the world was seen as existing within a transcendent framework of meaning. It was in relation to transcendent reality that human life found its meaning and could find fulfillment. This view of the world came to be replaced in Western societies by another, in which reality is seen in an immanent framework with no intrinsic reference to any transcendent reality. In the dominant ethos of Western modernity, the world and humanity are seen as self-sufficient and comprehensible without reference to God. Here, life is conducted and found meaningful according to what can be calculated and planned. In this modern worldview, religion has an ambivalent place. It can be useful for moral instruction, character formation, and as an aid to social order. But it isn’t necessary as such and it can give rise to violence and impede social progress.

This new immanent worldview and the secular societies and lifestyles based on it helped give rise to a sense of separation from God that was not addressed by models of the atonement focused on how Jesus relieves one of guilt, strengthens one against moral weakness, or gives hope that counters fear of death. In this context of secular modern societies, the understanding that Jesus saves by revealing the presence and loving nature of God took on renewed relevance.

What follows will examine this as presented in the Christologies of Karl Rahner, Dorothee Soelle, and Roger Haight. The theologies and Christologies that these three produced are very different. Karl Rahner tended to write in a dense style, and was intent on showing how the Christian faith and being Roman Catholic were comprehensible in relation to the dominant forms of knowledge and experience in modern Western societies. He helped stimulate the renewal of trinitarian theology in the twentieth century and was concerned that theology be both continuous with church tradition and meaningful in the present. Dorothee Soelle wrote in a brief, accessible style that focused on the meaningfulness of Jesus in relation to contemporary experiences of the absence of God, injustice, sorrow, joy, and desire. Her theology draws on contemporary drama, literature, art, and her own experiences as much as church tradition. Her thought was immensely popular in peace and justice movements with church affiliations. Roger Haight is a contemporary revisionist Roman Catholic working in the United States, who seeks to show how Christian faith can be understood in what is now a postmodern era. He writes in an accessible style and works in an ecumenical context. Different as their theologies are, they share an emphasis on a particular way of understanding Jesus’ saving significance in relation to modern experiences of the absence of God.

The way in which these three see Jesus overcoming the experience of God’s absence is illustrated in the musical The Music Man. In this drama, a fraudulent traveling salesperson comes into a community and transforms it by revealing something that was present there all along but which its members had been unaware of. Through their encounter with him, the lives of many community members become filled with a new sense of purpose and joy. The potential for this had always been present. But it was not actualized until he disclosed it. A woman in the community describes the salesperson’s effect on her in the song entitled “Till There Was You.”

There were bells on the hill

But I never heard them ringing,

No, I never heard them at all

Till there was you.

There were birds in the sky

But I never saw them winging

No, I never saw them at all

Till there was you.

… … … …

There was love all around

But I never heard it singing

No, I never heard it at all

Till there was you!³

Rahner, Soelle, and Haight do not see Jesus as a fraudulent traveling salesperson, but each understands him as having saving significance in a similar way. In their Christologies, the main evil that people need to be delivered from is a lack of awareness of God’s presence. Jesus saves by making God powerfully present through his life, death, and resurrection. Though God is always present, Jesus gives people a new consciousness of this through the disclosive power of his person. In the encounter with him, a new awareness of God’s nearness and love is made available that empowers people to further express God’s love in their own lives. Though the Christologies of Rahner, Soelle, and Haight are multifaceted and have significant differences, central to each is a focus on how Jesus is preeminently the revealer of God.

Karl Rahner

Karl Rahner was born in Freiburg, Germany, on March 5, 1904.⁴ He grew up there and in 1922 followed his older brother Hugo in joining the Jesuit religious order. His theological studies began in 1929 in Holland. In 1933 he was sent to study philosophy at Freiburg. The philosopher Martin Heidegger was there, and Rahner participated in his seminar.⁵ However, he had to work under Martin Honecker. In some respects, this did not go well. Rahner’s thesis attempted a modern reinterpretation of Aquinas’s metaphysics of human knowledge.⁶ Honecker judged it unacceptable. Rahner published it anyway as Spirit in the World.⁷ Along with his subsequent Hearers of the Word,⁸ this provided the theoretical basis for his theology, as he went on to become one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. Rahner taught at the University of Innsbruck from 1937 to 1964. He retired in 1971 but remained active as a theologian until his death in 1984. His theology continues to be influential in Roman Catholic and ecumenical theology.

Rahner’s thought was developed primarily in relation to tensions between Roman Catholic teaching and modern Western society. His theological studies occurred when the mood in Roman Catholic and Protestant theology in Europe “was one of reaffirmation in the face of the challenges of modernity.”⁹ Along with others, he sought to build a bridge between Roman Catholic teaching and forms of thought and experience characteristic of Western modernity by showing how these were compatible when correctly understood. Rahner’s thought has a circular dynamic.¹⁰ It began out of his own experience of Jesus mediating the presence of God through the worship of the church and its sacraments. He experienced and accepted church teaching about Jesus Christ as true. The question was, how should this be understood in twentieth-century Western society?¹¹ His Christology developed in answer to this question.

When Rahner began his theological studies, the dominant view of reality in modern Western thought was that it was a closed nexus of cause and effect. This meant that accounts of miracles, including Jesus’ resurrection and much church teaching, seemed to express myths from a bygone age rather than truth one could live by. This conflict between the modern Western worldview and traditional Roman Catholic teaching was creating a pastoral crisis within the Roman Catholic Church in the North Atlantic hemisphere and preventing the church there from effectively communicating its message. Coupled with this, and equally important as challenges to Christian thought, were the explosion of knowledge and the cultural pluralism confronting the Roman Catholic Church as a worldwide institution.¹²

The scholastic approach to theology that preceded Rahner had positioned theology as the queen of the sciences, giving unity to the many different forms of knowledge. Rahner judged that theology could no longer proceed in this way. In the new context of Western modernity, there was simply too much for any one person to know, and the accepted results of various disciplines were now changing too quickly to form a basis from which to interpret the gospel. He responded by instead developing an approach to theology that came to be known as transcendental Thomism.¹³ This involved interpreting the truth claims of theology less in relation to what people know and more in relation to how they know it and who they are as people seeking knowledge about themselves and their world.¹⁴

According to Rahner, when one asks what it means to know something and why one seeks to know it, one transcends the questions characteristic of any one area of study and moves from considering finite or conditioned aspects of existence to contemplating one’s relationship to the infinite or unconditioned, which is the final horizon of all human knowing and acting.¹⁵ Moving in this way from asking about aspects of one’s being to asking about one’s being as a whole, one discovers that an unconditioned mysterious horizon of being—meaning and mystery—is implicitly present in all aspects of life and thought.¹⁶ To be a person is to be positioned between the world of finite realities and an unconditioned horizon of being, and to be oriented toward the latter in search for meaning.¹⁷ According to Rahner, it is only in relation to this that people can gain the unconditioned meaning and affirmation they seek. Salvation is in essence a matter of receiving an affirmation of ultimate meaning from this mysterious horizon, which Christians know as God.¹⁸ This understanding of the person that Rahner developed in his early works laid the basis for his attempt to overcome the conceptual impediments to Christian faith in Western modernity.

Rahner developed his Christology in two stages, though always on the basis of church teaching, particularly as found in the Chalcedonian Definition and the understanding of the person outlined above. For Rahner, Jesus was what the Chalcedonian Definition affirmed him to be, fully human and fully divine, the two natures united in his one person. As such, he is the culmination of God’s revelation in history, the irrevocable and unsurpassable expression of God’s Word of acceptance to humanity. The revelation of God in history culminates in Jesus, as the Second Person of the Trinity became incarnate in him. In the first part of his career, Rahner developed his Christology along these lines, and this continued to be the basis for his understanding of Jesus’ saving significance.

In the 1960s, Rahner began developing a complementary way of understanding Jesus, arguing that in order for Christology to be believable in Western modernity, it must be free of any “mythology impossible to accept nowadays.”¹⁹ For Rahner, this meant that the incarnation must be intelligible as an event that did not violate the created order. The Chalcedonian affirmation that Jesus was fully human must be honored as much as the affirmation that he was fully divine. Accordingly, Rahner began to develop a Christology from below to match his previously worked-out Christology from above. In his earlier Logos Christology, or Christology from above, Rahner sought to show how Jesus was God’s final Word who disclosed God’s gracious presence in a definitive way. In his subsequent Christology from below, he sought to show how this was compatible with a modern understanding of Jesus as a human being.

Rahner did this by arguing that the incarnation occurred through the response of Jesus to the self-communication of the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. What is central and redemptive about Jesus is his being the one who fully said yes to God and in whom God said yes to humanity, once and for all. In saying yes to God in this way, Jesus actualized a potential that is in principle present in every person, and he culminated a history of salvation that Rahner argued can be understood as fitting with an evolutionary worldview. Jesus accepted God’s self-communication to him supremely by dying in obedience and trust in God. As Jesus did this, God said yes to him in the resurrection, and Jesus became the incarnate expression of God’s Word.

For Rahner, the resurrection is not so much subsequent to Jesus’ death as included in it as God’s affirmation of the trust and obedience that Jesus showed God in his death.²⁰ The temporal sequence of these events is less important than the intrinsic relationship they exemplify between the initiative of God’s Logos and the obedie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jesus as Revealer
• Chapter 2: Jesus as Moral Exemplar
• Chapter 3: Jesus as Source of Ultimate Hope
• Chapter 4: Jesus as the Suffering Christ
• Chapter 5: Jesus as Source of “Bounded Openness”
• Conclusion: Fifteen Christologies Later …
• Glossary
• Notes
• Index