On Rahner, a caution: how Rahnerians "lacked the vital immersion in the Catholic theological Tradition that had characterized Rahner himself"
From First Things
Karl Rahner: An Appreciation
and Critique
by Robert Imbelli
Robert Royal’s
fine book A Deeper Vision: The
Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century consists, by and large, of a series of
inviting and insightful essays on the great figures who brought that tradition
into creative and challenging encounter with a culture that was fast forgetting
its Christian roots.
Maritain and
Gilson, de Lubac and Rahner, von Balthasar and Ratzinger are treated with
generosity and discernment. As are the poets and novelists of the Catholic
revival in England and France
I found
particular resonance, for personal and professional reasons, in the pages
dedicated to the great Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner. My own theological
education began in the 1960s, at a time both propitious and problematic. I had
the grace of studying at Rome ’s Gregorian University
All through the
sixties Karl Rahner was, by any measure, the dominant theological voice. He
took a leading role in launching the journal “Concilium,” edited the
multi-volume Sacramentum Mundi (the one-volume abridgment of which
was the ordination present of choice for about ten years), and produced a steady
stream of dense articles that sought to further the “aggiornamento”
motif of the Council. These articles were quickly gathered into the many
volumes of his Schriften zur
Theologie, and, with increasing rapidity, translated into English as Theological Investigations.
Almost fifty
years since I first read them, I still have vivid and grateful recollections of
two of these articles: “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology” and “What
Is a Dogmatic Statement?” It would not be excessive to say that they provided
me with a real sense of theological liberation. In the face of a more
constricted neo-Scholasticism, Rahner enabled one to savor the rich amplitude
of the Catholic dogmatic tradition that did not pretend to circumscribe Mystery
narrowly, but evoked and pointed toward the true direction in which it was to
be encountered, pondered, and celebrated.
Dogma, Rahner
taught, is of its very nature mystagogic, and the theologian in the Church is
called to be a mystagogue. But that requires that he or she be steeped in the
Church’s Tradition and nourished by the Church’s liturgy and spirituality.
Hence Rahner’s
commitment to “aggiornamento” cannot be separated from his immersion in
“ressourcement”—from his rootedness in Ignatian spirituality, his
recovery of the Patristic tradition of the spiritual senses, and his ongoing
wrestling with the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Only thus equipped can the
theologian engage in fruitful dialogue with the modern world, seeking to
illumine its joy and hope, suffering and affliction with the light of the
Gospel.
Those of us who
fell under the Rahnerian spell in the sixties and seventies reveled in his
evocation of God’s Holy Mystery, of God as “semper major,” with its
apophatic sensibility. “Si comprehendis, non est Deus,” Rahner repeated
with Augustine: If you think to have grasped God, it is not God whom you have
grasped.
We also echoed
with fervor his insistence upon the inseparability of the Mystery of God and
the mystery of man—his “anthropocentric turn” in theology. This promised to
help repair the breach which in neo-Scholasticism separated theology and
spirituality—a divorce also lamented by Hans Urs von Balthasar, who, like
Rahner, was deeply rooted in the Ignatian spiritual tradition.
However, as the
seventies bled into the eighties, students of Rahner assumed positions of
importance in university and seminary schools of theology. More and more, they
lacked the vital immersion in the Catholic theological Tradition that had
characterized Rahner himself. Too often, the hard-won and differentiated
conclusions of the master became the facile and often clichéd starting points
of the disciples.
Rahner’s pregnant
apophaticism, awe before the Holy Mystery, became an empty transcendentalism,
without form or definition. It became the vague and distant mountain upon whose
accommodating surface many salvific paths wended their winding way. Not “no
other name,” but “many other names under heaven.”
This suggests
what led me and others to take our distance from the Rahnerian enterprise, while,
like Robert Royal, remaining appreciative of much that he had accomplished. The
crucial issue was the centrality of Jesus Christ. To his immense credit, Rahner
always taught, faithful to the liturgical and theological Tradition, that all
grace is the grace of Christ. But when this was implicitly or explicitly denied
by many who claimed to have learned from him, one could not but wonder whether
Rahner’s theological edifice was erected upon insufficient Christological
foundations.
In 1970, a young
theologian who had collaborated with Rahner during the Council voiced his
concerns in a series of probing questions. Royal cites him as asking:
“Is it true that Christianity adds nothing to the universal but merely makes it known? Is the Christian really just man as he is? … Is it not the main point of the faith of both Testaments that man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he ceases to be what he is? Does not Christianity become meaningless when it is reinstated in the universal, whereas what we really want is the new, the other, the saving transformation?”
Whether Rahner’s
theology allows him to respond adequately to these questions posed by Joseph
Ratzinger would fuel a fascinating and lengthy discussion. But by placing the
absolute newness of Christ and the transformation it demands at the very center
of his theology, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI continues to inspire and nourish
the theology and spirituality of many of us.
Father Robert
Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York ,
is associate professor emeritus at Boston
College
© 2016 First
Things
