Karl Rahner's Theological Project

Theology's Task for the 20th Century Catholic:
- make theology intellectually respectable in the modern world by honestly confronting the difficulties posed by modern philosophy and science
- place theology at the service of the larger concerns of Christian faith
- do these together, as the success of one depends on the other
- thereby avoid unthinking pietism on one hand and false intellectualism on the other
- this unity is rooted in the unity of the thinking, believing subject

Karl Rahner's Approach:
- Human experience is the starting-point for Rahner's theology because it is the one common ground to which we all have direct and immediate access:
1. If human existence and our experience of it can be analyzed to discover categories in which God can be spoken of 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.
2. If human existence offers 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.
3. If 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.

The Primacy of Experience from Within:

1. Experiential knowledge
- We acquire experiential knowledge/ pre-conceptual knowledge/ un-thematic knowledge/ original knowledge not from without but from within existence
- This knowledge 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
- for example, an adult is in existence in a deeper way than a child for having a lifetime of making decisions, of joys and sorrows, and all the other things that make up the stuff of adult human life and the stuff of theological reflection; for example, anyone who has tried to be faithful to conscience even when it cost something, or tried to love unselfishly, has touched human experience in ways that another might now, and thereby come to know it in a way that the other cannot
- One must be in experience before one can reflect on it

2. Conceptual Knowledge
- Conceptual knowledge gives expression to our relationship to the world, rather than creating it
- To express our experiential knowledge on a social level of reflection, expression and communication, we must objectify it
- Explicit/ thematic/ conceptual knowledge embodies experiential knowledge in concepts and words that others can hear and understand
- This objectification of experience only symbolizes experience and never constitutes it*, and thus it is necessary to relate concepts back to their sources so that they do not become empty abstractions
(*Note: I wonder if this is really the case.... I think it is quite possible for conceptual expressions to form our experience of the world, similar to the way in which language not only expresses but forms and dictates thought. Is Rahner establishing an artificially sharp distinction between first order substance and second order description?)

The Experience of Transcendence: Our Infinite Subjectivity
- All of our experience of the world is also simultaneously an experience of the 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 are not explicitly thinking about it, so too we are aware of ourselves in the process knowing
- This self-awareness always present in our knowledge is our capacity for being present to ourselves, and that is the basic characteristic which makes human existence spiritual existence (Note: Rahner is a genius!!)
- We exist in the world as spiritual beings because our existence is not completely absorbed by or immersed in the world as object, for we simultaneously retain and possess ourselves int his capacity for self-presence
- All of our knowledge 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, and we transcend our knowledge
- Hence Rahner begins at transcendent experience as a basic starting point of being the mysteries that we are!

The Philosophical Moment: Reflecting on General Human Experience
- "Existentials" - the general structures which necessarily characterize all human existence and which therefore can constitute the philosophical foundations upon which theology can build
- For example: self-presence, freedom, and transcendence (and Rahner's fourth: grace, the 'supernatural existential')
- 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, and to connect our today with our past
- Rahner invokes tradition, a cross-fertilization of Plato-Aristotle-Augustine-Aquinas and Germans-Kant-Heidegger:
1. Humans can know what is beyond the finite and sensible world, can know the metaphysical beyond the physical (Rahner: we exist in finite world as material existents and transcend it as spiritual existents, "Spirit in the World")
2. By turning theology, like modern philosophy, to the subject and showing this ever-receding horizon of knowledge, Rahner demonstrates the absolute openness of the human subject in its unlimited transcendence, mystery
3. Mystery is not an unsolved problem but something positively unknowable
4. The very essence of being human is to be open and undetermined in being and knowledge
5. Human beings experience themselves as those to whom ultimate meaning must come through history if at all
6. Humans by their very nature are listeners for and possible hearers of the word of salvation and grace
7. Human existence is transcendent existence, able to be known and loved by what is beyond the finite world and can therefore know and love in return (Note: Are we missing a few linking steps here?)
- Thus Rahner establishes a philosophical basis for doing Christian theology and provides a contemporary framework within which Christianity can make sense

The Theological Moment: Reflecting on Lived Faith
- Theological reflection on human existence cannot become a closed system because human existence is not a closed system

- Christianity is a historical religion in that it talks about contingent, particular events, about events which happened in time, calling the expression of this salvific significance a history of revelation:
1. We must know the historical Jesus by whatever means possible (biblical studies and exegesis, etc)
2. We must express the theological significance of his life, to formulate Christologies in such a way that faith in him makes sense in new historical and cultural situations

- Transcendental Christology:
1. We must keep one eye on the past, on the history of Jesus and the history of what has been said about him in scripture and tradition
2. We must look to the present in order to develop conceptual framework within which this past can speak to the present and actually be heard and understood in it.
- transcendental because it focuses on those necessary or universal structures within which all concrete human history takes place (transcendental as undergirding the categorical)
- transcendental Christology an express the universal significance of Jesus' particularity
- Jesus is the fullest actualization of that meaning which comes through the actualities of history, and the fulfillment of the human potential for self-transcendence
- The real potentialities of human existence are actual and known because they have been actualized in a concrete, historical person.

A Theology of Grace: The Supernatural Existential
- Rahner posits a 'supernatural existential,' a supernatural general structures which necessarily characterizes all human existence
- The essence of concrete human existence involves being called to what transcends our existence, to life iwth God
- All people were created from the very beginning for grace; it belongs to the very essence of concrete human nature to be called to grace, to be able to find God in the particularities of all history (Note: Is this supernatural existential the orientation towards God which is part and parcel of being human?)
- History of salvation/revelation is coextensive with history of the human race
- So the history of the Jewish and Christian peoples can also be known through the history of all people, however different their way of conceptualizing and expressing this knowledge may be

Intrinsic and Therefore Universal Implications
- Human nature is understood as transcententally open to self-transcendence in history, not as a closed or static structure given from the beginning of human history
- History of salvation/revelation is the realization of human nature's deepest potentialities, not an extrinsic add-on to human history from the outside
- Grace/salvation/revelation/human history are all one history, not separated between a natural/secular history and a particular and exclusive Judeo-Christian salvation history
- By making the offer of grace intrinsic to human nature, it makes a universal offer
- This offer is the ground and horizon of all experience and is integrated into the whole of existence in all its dimensions; everything that is really human can be a "channel of grace," a finite mediation of our relationship to God
- Rahner unites 'secular" and 'religious' moments into one human experience

Balancing the Transcendental with the Historical:
- Transcendental structures of knowledge and freedom must be actualized int he world and in history
- (There is no music in the potentialities of sound, but only when a Beethoven creates his music from them)
- There is no actual knowledge of God and no free response to him except when actualized in the world and in history
- Humanity's transcendental essence achieves actuality in time and space and has no existence of its own apart from the concrete world and concrete history
- Humanity is indeed transcendence and spirit, but only in and through the particularities of our individual and social world and our individual and collective history
- It is of the very nature of human existence to express itself in order to be itself (Note: So here are we getting an answer to my question about the formative role of expression in constituting experience?)
- The transcendental possibility of revelation must become actual by coming to expression in concrete, particular revelations
- Jesus is the concrete historical person in whom God's offer of grace and human response to this offer became flesh, became visible, audible, and tangible in the world
- Jesus is a real symbol, sign or sacrament of this grace
- The Church is a sacrament or real symbol in that it its sacramental activities are activities in which there is expressed and made explicitly religious a relationship to God which can be mediated by all finite reality.
- Understanding church and sacraments as real symbols means that we do not encounter God for the first time in a church or in explicitly religious activities, but in human life

God as Mystery
- If the world is comprised of symbols of human transcendence, then the ultimate reality symbolized lies ever beyond all the symbols nad remains a mystery
- This mystery we can never grasp, the mystery we call God, the mystery of the life and death of Jesus and the mystery of all human living and dying are one and the same mystery
- being a Christian dn responding to this mystery in faith and hope and love is the fullest way of being human

(Dych, William. 'Theology in a New Key." A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology." Ed. Leo O'Donovan. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989)