Theologische anthropologie karl rahner biography

The basis for Rahner's theology is that all human beings have a latent "unthematic" awareness of God in any experiences of limitation in knowledge or freedom as finite subjects. Because such experience is the "condition of possibility" for knowledge and freedom as such, Rahner borrows the language of Kant to describe this experience as "transcendental".

Such is the extent of Rahner's idea of the "natural knowledge of God"—what can be known by reason prior to the advent of "special" revelation—that God is only approached asymptotically, in the mode of what Rahner calls "absolute mystery". While one may try to furnish proofs for God's existence, these explicit proofs ultimately refer to the inescapable orientation towards mystery which constitute—by transcendental necessity—the very nature of the human being.

Rahner often prefers the term "mystery" to that of "God". Can the line between the human asymptote and the Mystery asymptote connect? In Rahner's theology, the Absolute Mystery reveals himself in self-communication. Rahner examines evolution in his work Homanisation , rev. The title represents a term he coined, deriving it from "hominization", the theory of man's evolutionary origins.

The book's preface describes the limits of Catholic theology with respect to evolution, further on giving a summary of official church teaching on the theory. He then continues in the next sections to propound "fundamental theology" in order to elucidate the background or foundation of church teaching. In the third section he raises some philosophical and theological questions relating to the concept of becoming, the concept of cause, the distinction between spirit and matter, the unity of spirit and matter, the concept of operation, and the creation of the spiritual soul.

Central for Rahner is the theological doctrine of grace , which for Rahner is a constituent element of man's existence, so that grace is a permanent modification of human nature in a supernatural "existential", to use a Heidegger term. Accordingly, Rahner doubts the real possibility of a state of pure nature natura pura , which is human existence without being involved with grace.

In treating the present existence of man and his future as human, Rahner affirms that "the fulfillment of human existence occurs in receiving God's gift of Himself, not only in the beatific vision at the end of time, but present now as seed in grace. Rahner has been open to the prospect of extraterrestrial intelligence , the idea that cosmic evolution has yielded sentient life forms in other galaxies.

Logically, this raises for Rahner some important questions of philosophical , ethical , and theological significance: he argues against any theological prohibition of the notion of extraterrestrial life, while separating the existential significance of such life forms from that of angels. Moreover, Rahner advances the possibility of multiple Incarnations, but does not delve into it: given the strong Christological orientation of his theology, it does not appear likely he would have propended for repetitions of the Incarnation of Christ.

For Rahner, at the heart of Christian doctrine is the co-reality of incarnation-grace. Incarnation and grace appear as technical terms to describe the central message of the Gospel: God has communicated Himself. The self-communication of God is crucial in view: grace is not something other than God, not some celestial 'substance,' but God Himself.

The event of Jesus Christ is, according to Rahner, the centre-point of the self-communication of God. God, insists Rahner, does not only communicate Himself from without ; rather, grace is the constitutive element both of the objective reality of revelation the incarnate Word and the subjective principle of our hearing the internal Word and the Holy Spirit.

To capture the relation between these aspects of grace, Rahner appropriates the Heideggerian terminology of "thematization:" the objective mediation is the explicit "thematization" of what is always already subjectively proffered — the history of grace's categorical expression without, culminating in the event of Jesus Christ, is the manifestation of what is always already on offer through the supernatural existential, which enters amid a transcendental horizon within.

Rahner's particular interpretation of the mode in which grace makes itself present is that grace is a permanent modification of human nature in a supernatural existential a phrase borrowed from Heidegger. Grace is perceived in light of Christianity as a constitutive element of human existence. For this reason, Rahner denies the possibility of a state of pure nature natura pura , human existence without being-involved with grace , which according to him is a counterfactual.

Like others of his generation, Rahner was much concerned with refuting the propositional approach to theology typical of the Counter-Reformation. The alternative he proposes is one where statements about God are always referring back to the original experience of God in mystery. In this sense, language regarding being is analogically predicated of the mystery, inasmuch as the mystery is always present but not in the same way as any determinate possible object of consciousness.

Some have noted that the analogy of being is greatly diminished in Rahner's thought. Instead, they claim, equivocal predication dominates much of Rahner's language about God. In this respect, similarity between him and other Thomist-inspired theologians is seen as problematic. Rahner criticised Jesusism , despite his stated respect for the position.

Jesusism tends to focus narrowly on Jesus' life for imitation, apart from the Christian God or Church. If the task of Christology is to make intelligible the Christian faith that Jesus of Nazareth , a historical person, is Christ as the centre of all human history and the final and full revelation of God to humanity—then Rahner feels that within "the contemporary mentality which sees the world from an evolutionary point of view" [ 36 ] the person of Christ should not be emphasised in his unique individuality whilst ignoring any possibility of combining the event of Christ with the process of human history as a whole.

In fact, it appears there are some limitations of classic Christological formula suggested by the Council of Chalcedon AD which affirms "one identical Son, our Lord Jesus Christ Thus, Rahner introduces transcendental Christology , which interprets the event and person of Christ in relation to the essential structure of the human person, reflecting on the essential conditions of all human experiences, conditions which transcend any one particular kind of experience.

This means that in spite of their differences, there is "an inner similarity and commonality" among things, which forms a single world. This commonality is most clearly disclosed in a human being as a form of the unity of spirit and matter: it is only in a human person that spirit and matter can be experienced in their real essence and in their unity.

Rahner states that spirit represents the unique mode of existence of a single person when that person becomes self-conscious and is always oriented towards the incomprehensible Mystery called God. However, it is only in the free acceptance by the subject of this mystery and in its unpredictable disposal of the subject that the person can genuinely undertake this process of returning to the self.

Conversely, matter is the condition which makes human beings estranged from themselves towards other objects in the world and makes possible an immediate intercommunication with other spiritual creatures in time and space. Even if there is an essential difference between spirit and matter, that is not understood as an essential opposition: the relationship between the two can be said as "the intrinsic nature of matter to develop towards spirit".

According to Rahner, Christian faith affirms that the cosmos reaches its final fulfillment when it receives the immediate self-communication of its own ground in the spiritual creatures which are its goal and its high point. God's self-communication is given to cosmic subjects who have freedom to accept or reject it and who have intercommunication with other existents.

It takes place only if the subjects freely accept it, and only then forms a common history in a sense that "it is addressed to all men in their intercommunication" then "addressed to others as a call to their freedom". In order to be fulfilled, this event should have "a concrete tangibility in history".

Theologische anthropologie karl rahner biography

If one then examines Rahner's transcendental Christology , it may be seen that it "presupposes an understanding of the relationship of mutual conditioning and mediation in human existence between what is transcendentally necessary and what is concretely and contingently historical. Furthermore, God's self-communication and human hope for it should be "mediated historically" because of "the unity of transcendentality and historicity in human existence": human hope looks in history for its salvation from God that "becomes final and irreversible, and is the end in an 'eschatological' sense.

Such a man with this destiny is what is meant by an "absolute saviour". Rahner believes that the saviour described by his transcendental Christology is not diverse from the one presented by the classic Christological formulations of Chalcedon , which used a concept of hypostatic union to claim Jesus as the Christ. Accordingly, he then proceeds to articulate the meaning of the hypostatic union.

He creates the human reality by the very fact that he assumes it as his own. According to Rahner, human beings are created to be oriented towards the incomprehensible Mystery called God. However, this human orientation towards the Mystery can be fully grasped only if we as humans freely choose to be grasped by the incomprehensible one: if God assumes human nature as God's own reality with God's irrevocable offer of God's self-communication, and a person freely accepts it, the person is united with God, reaching the very point towards which humanity is always moving by virtue of its essence, a God-Man which is fully fulfilled in the person of Jesus of Nazareth claimed by Christian faith.

In this sense, Rahner sees the incarnation of God as "the unique and highest instance of the actualization of the essence of human reality". To answer the question of how we find a God-Man in history, Rahner employs a historical approach to Christology by examining the history of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth and proposes two theses beforehand: 1 Christian faith requires a historical basis; and 2 considering a possibility of significant difference between who the person is and the extent to which that person verbalises or expresses identity, it is possible both to say that "the self-understanding of the pre-resurrection Jesus may not contradict in an historical sense the Christian understanding of his person and his salvific significance", and to state that his self-understanding may not coincide with the content of Christological faith.

To establish the grounds of Christian faith, Rahner asserts that two points should be proven as historically credible—first, that Jesus saw himself "as the eschatological prophet, as the absolute and definitive saviour", and second, that the resurrection of Jesus is the absolute self-communication of God. Rahner states that the death and the resurrection of Jesus are two aspects of a single event not to be separated, [ 57 ] even though the resurrection is not a historical event in time and place like the death of Jesus.

What the Scripture offers are powerful encounters in which the disciples come to experience the spirit of the risen Lord Jesus among them, provoking a resurrection faith of the disciples as "a unique fact". Jesus is vindicated as the absolute saviour" by God: [ 59 ] it means "this death as entered into in free obedience and as surrendering life completely to God, reaches fulfillment and becomes historically tangible for us only in the resurrection.

Anonymous Christianity is the theological concept that declares that people who have never heard the Christian Gospel might be saved through Christ. Inspiration for this idea sometimes comes from the Second Vatican Council's Lumen gentium , which teaches that those "who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and moved by grace, try in their actions to do His will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation.

Rahner's development of the idea preceded the council, and became more insistent after it received its conciliar formulation. Non-Christians could have "in [their] basic orientation and fundamental decision", Rahner wrote, "accepted the salvific grace of God, through Christ, although [they] may never have heard of the Christian revelation.

Rahner's transcendental Christology opens another horizon which comprises non-Christian religions, as God's universal saving will in Christ extends to non-Christians: since Christ is the saviour of all people, salvation for non-Christians comes only through Christ anonymous Christians. Just as importantly, it is possible to say that Christians can learn from other religions or atheistic humanism because God's grace is and can be operative in them.

In the essays of Schriften V , the analogy was significantly broadened by his discussion of evolutionary science, world religions, and utopian views of the future. Schriften VI 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 ; English translation, Mission and Grace and gathered a new collection of essays in spirituality Schriften VII In he helped to draft a plan for the Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, which subsequently appeared in five volumes — 72 with Rahner as one of its editors.

With Heinrich Schlier he conceived the series of Questiones Disputatae ff. 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 Late Development. Reflecting on the historical concreteness of Christianity and its social responsibility, three further volumes of the Schriften , , 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 , 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" ; English translation, Foundations of Christian Faith 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 and on an ecumenical understanding of Church office , as well as Schriften XI , which gathers his early studies on the practice and theology of penance, and Schriften XII , which centers on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Having participated in the first planning of Mysterium Salutis 5 v.

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 — Between and he lectured and wrote vigorously, publishing four more volumes of the Schriften v. XII — XVI: , , , ; a new edition of his Dictionary of Theology ; moving essays on prayer , love of neighbor and love of Jesus , ; and a dialogical apology for contemporary faith, co-authored with Karl-Heinz Weger He was also represented by several anthologies, one of which, The Practice of Faith , 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. 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. For a complete, chronological listing of Rahner's publications see: r. O'donovan, L. The Jesuit priest Karl Rahner is widely regarded to have been one of the leading Catholic theologians of the twentieth century. Rahner's early writings on death were published at a time when academic theology gave little serious consideration to the topic.

Less sophisticated believers generally assumed that they knew what death was, and quickly moved on to mythological conjectures about the afterlife. Rahner sought to illuminate death's religious and theological significance. These initial publications and later writings are typical of his pioneering investigations, which creatively appropriate diverse theological and philosophical sources e.

Notwithstanding their uncompromising rigor, most of his articles had a broadly pastoral concern to explore ways of recovering the meaning of Catholic doctrine in an intellectually plausible and contemporary idiom. The density of Rahner's work is rooted in the subject matter itself. God , Rahner insisted, is not — and cannot — be an object for thought the way the things of our world are.

But a person can know God by attending to the movement of knowing itself toward its objects, which reveals that human thinking always reaches beyond its immediate objects toward a further horizon. The movement of knowing, and the ultimate "goal" toward which it reaches, can be grasped only indirectly or "transcendentally" as one's thinking turns back on itself reflexively.

Rahner identified the elusive and final "term" of this dynamism of knowing with God, and argued that the same kind of movement toward God as "unobjectifiable" horizon is entailed in freedom and love. By conceiving God, who always exceeds human reach, as the horizon of the movement of knowing, freedom, and love, Rahner emphasized that God is a mystery — a reality who is known and loved, but only reflexively and indirectly, as the ever-receding horizon of the human spirit.

God remains a mystery in this sense even in self-communication to humanity through Jesus and the Holy Spirit. With this participation of God in an earthly history of human interconnectedness, something of God is anticipated — known reflexively and indirectly — at least implicitly whenever we know, choose, or love a specific being, particularly a neighbor in need.

Conversely, God is implicitly rejected in every refusal of truth, freedom, and love. Because it is often the good of a neighbor or the world, rather than God or Jesus which is directly affirmed or refused, it is quite possible that the one deciding will be unconscious or even deny that the act is a response to God. In either case, however, one turns toward or away from God and Jesus in turning one's mind and heart freely toward or away from the realities of the world.

Death is a universal and definitive manifestation of this free acceptance or rejection of God's self-communication "grace". In that sense, death is the culmination and fulfillment of a person's freedom, the final and definitive establishment of personal identity. It is not simply a transition to a new or continued temporal life. If there were no such culmination, no ability to make a permanent and final commitment of self, then freedom would be an illusion.

Genuine self-determination would be denied because every choice could be reversed. If everything is reversible, no act or succession of acts could definitively express an individual's identity. The Christian conviction that this life is the arena in which human fate is worked out, requires the freedom for such definitive acceptance or rejection of God's self-communication.

But any anthropology that takes seriously the human capacity for free self-determination would also be required to see death as a kind of culmination and definitive expression of personal identity. Hence death is not something that happens only to the physical body. Death involves and affects the person as a whole. It involves consciousness, freedom, and love.

It is not endured passively. Hence, death as a personal and spiritual phenomenon is not identical with the cessation of biological processes. For example, illness or medication can limit personal freedom well before the onset of clinically defined death. Moreover, insofar as all the engagements of one's life anticipate death, Rahner maintained that every moment of life participates in death.

Hence he disputed the notion of death as a final decision if this is understood to be an occurrence only at the last moment. The Christian tradition has emphasized the definitive and perduring character of personal existence by affirming the soul's survival after death. Rahner warned that this way of conceiving of death can be misleading if one imagines that the separation of soul and body, entails a denial of their intrinsic unity.

The contemporary appreciation of the bodily constitution of human reality was anticipated by the scholastic doctrine of the soul as the "form" of the body and thus intrinsically, not merely accidentally, related to it. Personal identity is shaped by one's embodied and historical engagement with the material world. Rachel's Health Updates 5 years ago.

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