A World of Grace

An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology

Leo O'Donovan, Leo O'Donovan

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781589012288
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

Organized as a companion volume to Karl Rahner's master work, Foundations of Christian Faith, this book, now again available, also provides the most useful introduction to his theology as a whole. Each chapter presents a broad commentary on the corresponding chapter of Foundations, beginning with Rahner's method and anthropology and concluding with his theology of the church and eschatology. It includes a separate chapter on Rahner's moral thought. Valuable for classroom or individual use, this volume provides questions for discussion, suggestions for further reading, and an extensive glossary of specialized terminology.

1
Theology in a New Key

WILLIAM V. DYCH

To appreciate Karl Rahner’s theological method we must understand where in human experience he finds a starting point for theology. This leads us to an overview of how he sees the situation of the human person before God. It also addresses the relation between the reflection on human experience found in philosophical thought and the reflection on lived faith conducted by theology.

ALL scientific inquiry, however advanced and complex it becomes, has its deepest roots in the simple human reality of curiosity and wonder, in what Aristotle long ago called our common “desire to know.” This desire reaches the level of scientific inquiry when our curiosity and wonder come to expression in specific questions about specific realities, and when the inquirer has found an adequate method to conduct his search and an adequate language to express his findings. Genuine search must be motivated by genuine wonder; genuine wonder must hit upon the right questions and the right method if it is to lead to knowledge and truth. Theology, like other sciences, begins with wonder; it differs from them in the kinds of questions it asks. But theologians can also differ among themselves not only in their answers, but also in how they pose their questions and how they go about answering them. To understand the method of Karl Rahner’s theology, then, we must look first not to the nature of his answers, but to the nature of his questions.

In our contemporary culture, however, the legitimacy of theological questions is not something which can be taken for granted, for it is questioned on two very different fronts. In the world of contemporary philosophy and science, theology is often afforded space on the university campus, but not really a home. For many, if not most, it is not really a respected partner in the work of the university. Some dismiss it as a relic of the past, a fossil from a bygone age, while others see it not as an affair of the mind and its search for knowledge and truth, but as an affair of the heart and feelings, a private affair of the individual and his needs or wishes or hopes. But on this front, too, theology does not always find an eager public. Many people who are trying to live their everyday lives as believers and as Christians, or at least would like to, find very little in theology to help them. Many an average person finds theology as heartless as the intellectuals find it headless. This truncated specimen has, indeed, survived, but are theology’s questions really of interest to anyone today except theologians? Why theology, then?

Faced with this situation, Karl Rahner is deeply enough involved in the intellectual life of his times to appreciate the validity of the criticism on the first front, and at the same time deeply enough involved in the life of Christian faith to be equally sensitive to the criticism on the other. Together they presented him with a twofold task, and he approached it with a principle that was to guide his theological method throughout. The task was, first, to make theology intellectually respectable in the modern world by honestly confronting the difficulties posed by modern philosophy and science, and, second, to place theology at the service of the larger concerns of Christian faith and life. The principle governing both is that they must be done together, that the success of one depends on the success of the other. For not only is there no contradiction between the life of the intellect and the life of faith, but the more deeply one thinks the closer one comes to the realities of which faith speaks. By insisting on and maintaining this unity, two extremes can be avoided: an unthinking pietism on the one hand, and a false intellectualism on the other. This unity is rooted ultimately in the unity of the thinking, believing subject, in that wonder which grounds both our intellectual and our religious search.

We shall try to trace the steps by which this basic purpose is translated into a definite program and a specific method. First, where to begin? Two traditional starting points seem obvious enough. At the heart of all religion, as well as of all theology, lies the basic presupposition that there exists a reality which we can know and which we call “God.” But it is to this very heart of the matter that the critiques of modern philosophy and science strike. For some, God is an unnecessary or at least an unverifiable hypothesis, for others an illegitimate “projection” or “illusion,” and for others simply unknowable by the canons of modern scientific and philosophical knowledge. God, then, cannot be the starting point or the presupposition for theology, for in the modern world God is not an answer but part of the problem. Should the starting point, then, be what Jesus Christ and the scriptures tell us about God? Modern historical criticism strikes just as deeply at this point. What can we really know of this man, it asks, and what sense can we really make of so much that Christian tradition says about him? Once again, Jesus Christ and the scriptures cannot be the answer, for they, too, have become part of the problem.

Is there a starting point, a presupposition, which can also be examined critically but which at least offers a common ground of discussion for everyone, whether they are believers or unbelievers, educated or uneducated? There is something, Rahner suggests, which touches all of us and to which we all have direct and immediate access: our shared human existence. If human existence and our experience of it can be analyzed to discover categories in which God can be spoken of intelligently and intelligibly by the strictest canons of knowledge and truth, then theology has at least a starting point to begin speaking of God in the contemporary world—no more than that at this point, but also no less. If, second, this same human existence offers a framework in which the history of Jesus and the history of what Christian tradition has said about him makes sense, then theology also has a starting point for speaking about Jesus Christ. And if, third, theology can discover its roots in human existence, then it can also stay close to human life and to all who are seriously trying to live it. In becoming intellectually respectable it need not become purely academic. In judging the success of his attempt, we must listen with one ear to what Karl Rahner is saying about human existence, and with the other, of course, to human existence itself, to my human existence, and then ask: Is he saying something true of me, and true of all of us?

The Primacy of Experience

If we are going to take human existence as the starting point for our theological reflection, we must state a very important principle here at the outset: One must first be in existence before one can reflect on it. But can we not take at least that much for granted? Yes and no. A child knows human existence at the level which is possible and appropriate at that age. But a child can neither exist nor know existence in the way that a person can in the course of a lifetime of making decisions or failing to make them, of successes and failures, of surprises and disappointments, of joys and sorrows, and all the other things which make up the stuff of adult human life, and also the “stuff” of theological reflection. But at this adult level, too, there are different ways of being or not being in existence: Has someone ever tried to be faithful to conscience even when it cost something, perhaps a great deal, or tried to love someone or something unselfishly, or experienced something good or beautiful or admirable in others? In all of these situations that person would have touched human existence and been touched by it in ways that another might not, and thereby come to know it in a way that the other cannot.

There is, then, a kind of knowledge we acquire not from without, but from within existence, by actually being in existence and experiencing it, and this we call “experiential knowledge.” Since it is not conveyed to us “from outside” by concepts or words or sentences, we also call it “preconceptual” or “unthematic” knowledge. We can learn about outer space or molecular physics or the existence of a distant continent we have never visited from the observations of others communicated to us by words and concepts, but we know about our own existence “from inside.” Human existence is not a thing which we have, or an object which we observe, but a process which we do and are; experiential knowledge is the knowledge we have of ourselves related to a world of persons and things in the actual living of this relationship. Hence Rahner calls this kind of knowledge “original” knowledge. It is “original” not in the sense that no one had it before, but in the sense that it wells up from the origins or depths of our own selves in our lived interaction with the world.

However, since we are not isolated individuals but social beings who exist with others, this knowledge wells up and reaches the level of reflection, expression, and communication. To express our experiential knowledge we must objectify it, in the sense of embodying it in concepts and words which others can hear and understand. Knowledge at this second level, which we call explicit, thematic, or conceptual knowledge, does not create our relationship to the world but rather gives expression to it.

Moreover, when we reflect upon experience, objectify it, and express it, the expression never completely recaptures or is identical with the original experience. The concepts of hope or joy or sorrow are not the same thing as the realities themselves. The symbol expresses the symbolized, but is never identical with it. Hence there exists a two-directional relationship between these two levels of the one knowledge: We must reflect and express in order to clarify and understand and communicate, and we must also constantly relate our concepts back to their source, lest they become empty abstractions. Applying to these levels of knowledge our original principle that one must first be in existence before one can reflect on it, we can also say that one must first experience existence before one can speak about it.

The Experience of Transcendence

To understand Karl Rahner’s theological method, we must attend in a special way to the aspect of human existence which he calls “transcendental experience.” By this he does not mean a separate experience among others but rather an element within all our existence in the world. Since it is unthematic in daily life, theology must reflect upon it. But just because it is unthematic, it can also be easily overlooked. How can we become more aware of what Rahner means?

First of all, we must observe that all of our experience of the world is also simultaneously an experience of the self, not an isolated self, but a self precisely in this world. In knowing something else, we are also aware of ourselves in this process of knowing, not as an explicit object of our attention, but in the sense that knowing is a conscious process or activity. Just as we are aware of ourselves as walking or talking even though we are not explicitly thinking about it, so too we are aware of ourselves in the process of knowing. Knowledge, then, is “two-directional.” In knowing an object the subject is aware of itself; knowledge encompasses both the knower and the known. This self-awareness, which is always present in our knowledge, is our capacity for being present to ourselves, and is that basic characteristic which makes human existence spiritual existence. We exist in the world as spiritual beings because our existence is not completely absorbed by or immersed in the world, for we retain and possess ourselves in this capacity for self-presence. This experience of self-presence in the midst of being present to a thousand other things is part of our experience of subjectivity, of being a conscious subject in the midst of the world of objects around us.

Secondly, we must also notice in this experience of subjectivity or personhood that the self we experience is not entirely determined by the world in which it exists. We are, indeed, part of the world and determined by it genetically, environmentally, and in countless other ways; we are very much the product of what is not ourselves. But because we possess this total self, including all its determinations, in our knowledge, we are also responsible for it. We experience ourselves as responsible for ourselves. Our freedom to choose this or that or to do this or that is really and fundamentally a freedom to make a self and choose an identity. And to the extent that we are free, self-conscious subjects we exist beyond the world and its causes and explanations, and in this sense we transcend it. This experience of subjectivity or personhood is the characteristically human mode of existence in the world, of being a spiritual existent in the world.

Where, then, do we come from, if not entirely from the world, and where does our transcendence take us, if the world does not entirely define our limits? All the knowledge we acquire always gives rise to further questions. When pushed far enough all of our clarities trail off into obscurity; the chain of scientific logic hangs loose at both ends. The more we know, the more we realize we don’t know, and in this known unknown we have transcended our knowledge. Our freedom, too, ultimately ends in a question: Am I responsible only to myself and within the limits of time, or do I have a value beyond time and am I responsible to someone else? In raising the question we have already transcended the limits of time. Because we are self-conscious and free we experience our hopes, our desires, our loves and life itself as a question: Does it all make sense, does it have any ultimate meaning? This unthematic experience, the transcendental experience, is not just a single experience but an element within all experiences. To have experienced this ultimate question, which confronts us at every turn in our lives, is to have experienced the mystery which we are. It is this transcendental experience which Rahner reflects upon as a starting point for speaking of God.

The Philosophical Moment:
Reflecting on General Human Experience

It is ultimately the work of theology to present the Christian interpretation of the human situation we have just described, but to do this adequately an intermediate step is required. For theology claims to be an interpretation of all human existence, to be a response to human existence which is universally valid. Secondly, it claims that this interpretation and response is reasonable—intellectually justified. Hence it will be the work of philosophy to discover, in the world of individual experiences, certain general structures which necessarily characterize all human existence, and which therefore can constitute the philosophical foundations upon which theology can build. These structures are called “existentials,” and we have already considered three of them: self-presence, freedom, and transcendence. We shall be seeing a fourth when Rahner calls grace a “supernatural existential.” He sees the first three as philosophical presuppositions for his theological statement about grace.

Philosophy in this approach means, first, reflection upon our experience of human existence in its totality; our experience results in this total question which we are for ourselves. It means, secondly, a reflection which is accessible to anyone, believer or unbeliever, because it is not logically dependent on theology. In actuality, everyone has and lives out some presupposed or implicit view of human existence, and the role of philosophy is to make this explicit. In this sense philosophy does not give us new knowledge about ourselves, but articulates on the level of conceptual discourse what we already know on the experiential level. Otherwise philosophy is empty of experiential content: one must first be in existence before one can philosophize about it. Of the so-called philosophical “proofs” for the existence of God, for example, Rahner says that they are not informing us of a reality we have never touched in experience, but they are articulating our experience on the level of logical, conceptual, public discourse. If God is not present at the beginning of our syllogism, neither is he present at the end.

This approach to philosophy, therefore, is different from any kind of rationalism, which is based on the conviction that we know reality primarily through concepts, through “clear and distinct ideas” which reach their fullness in scientific knowledge. But neither should we go to the other extreme, the position of classical modernism, which sees conceptual and logical discourse as an entirely dispensable process. The philosophical moment is necessary in theology in order that theology have a “public” language, a language that is intellectually justifiable before the public canons of knowledge and truth. By thus enabling theology to speak in and to our contemporary world, philosophy also provides theology with a link to the past. If it is successful, it can provide a contemporary framework of understanding in which to speak of the realities which past ages spoke of in their own frameworks. This work of “translation” is necessary if we are really to understand what past ages have handed down to us, and not just repeat it.

Since human existence is Rahner’s starting point in theology, what he needs more specifically from philosophy is a philosophy of human existence, that is, an anthropology. Where does he find the language to express his philosophical anthropology? As a Christian theologian he is working out of the philosophical tradition of the West, which has its roots in Plato and Aristotle and which in the Christian era reaches its high points in Augustine and Aquinas. He is aware of the greatness of this tradition and feels indebted to it, and in no way thinks that in order to exist in the present one has to forget the past. But he is also living in the intellectual milieu of the twentieth century and does not think that the history of philosophy ended with the Middle Ages; he is indebted to his own more recent German philosophical tradition “from Kant to Heidegger,” as he says. It is from these two traditions that he is going to draw the philosophical structures for his theology—not in eclectic fashion, taking a little from one and a little from the other, but viewing them as a single tradition. An example of this process of “cross-fertilization” should clarify how it provided him with fresh insights into his Christian tradition.

Thomas Aquinas teaches that all of our knowledge is rooted in our experience of the finite world. We are not endowed with a set of innate or inborn ideas. Aquinas also teaches that we can know what is beyond the finite, sensible world, that we can know the “metaphysical,” what is beyond the physical. This is an obvious presupposition if any kind of religion or theology is to be possible, but it stands in conflict with the opposite presupposition of much of the philosophy and science of our own world, namely, that this physical world is probably all that we have, and certainly all that we know. To establish this possibility of knowing what is beyond the physical world, Rahner wrote his first major philosophical work, Spirit in the World (New York: Seabury, 1968): human existents as material do indeed exist in the finite, physical world of time and space and are very much part of it and it of them, but as spiritual existents they also reach beyond this world and transcend it.

To establish this, we must reflect upon those experiences of transcendence we have already considered. At the same time, we also draw upon the insights of those modern philosophies which have turned their attention to the human subject. This so-called “turn to the subject” in modern philosophy refers to the fact that in modern, transcendental philosophy it is the inquiring subject itself which has become the object of inquiry. In thus turning to the subject, modern philosophy has become “anthropocentric” as distinguished from “cosmocentric,” not in the sense that it is interested only in humanity and not in the rest of the cosmos, but in the sense that it draws its basic paradigms for understanding reality from human existence. In following modern philosophy in this turn we acquire personal rather than impersonal categories in which to speak of human existence: self-presence, freedom, transcendence.

Moreover, we make this “turn to the subject” in order to establish, in the categories and logic of modern philosophy, our Thomistic thesis that personal existents do reach beyond the world in their experience of transcendence. Hence we ask: What are the limits of this transcendence, what is its term, what do we touch when we reach beyond ourselves in knowledge, freedom and love? This transcendence can be experienced as unlimited, as an openness which is unbounded and open in an absolute sense. We can use the image of a horizon to express this: our experience of the finite world opens us to a horizon which ever recedes as we move through the finite; there is always a “more” to be known and to be loved and to be lived. We are aware of it, but can never reach it; it is there, but it ever exceeds our grasp. By following our Thomistic starting point through modern philosophy’s “turn to the subject” in what is therefore called “transcendental Thomism,” we have arrived at an absolute openness of the human subject in its unlimited transcendence. This transcendence brings us not to a content of knowledge which we grasp, but to an absolute question. This experience of the unattainable and the incomprehensible we call the experience of mystery.

Can this mystery be more for us than an ever larger and deeper mystery, can we ever know more about it and thereby more about ourselves? If our experience of mystery is as Rahner has described it, not simply an as yet unsolved problem but something positively unknowable, then such knowledge cannot be of our own doing. It would have to be given to us to know, and in this sense revealed to us. If, moreover, it is of the very essence of human existence to be open and undetermined in its being and in its knowledge, then human beings experience themselves as those to whom ultimate meaning must come through history if it is to come at all. Human beings by their very nature are listeners for and possible hearers of the word of salvation and grace. This is the conclusion of Rahner’s other major philosophical work, Hearers of the Word (New York: Seabury, 1969).

What has been acquired for theology through this philosophica...