4. Roman Catholic Theology Today

4. Roman Catholic Theology Today

The Roman Catholic Church makes a distinction between theology and magisterium, allowing intellectual freedom for theologians but reserving authoritative pronouncements to the magisterium. For the past fifty years the primary characteristic of Roman Catholic theology has been a desire to be truly modern in terms of post-Enlightenment theology. Recent theologians have called into question the meaning of every affirmation of the historic faith of the Christian church. Thus, the debate between evangelical Protestant theologians and contemporary Roman Catholic theologians focuses on the most radically fundamental theological issues conceivable.

Many points of comparison exist between modern Catholic theology and liberal Protestant theology. Of special concern is how Roman Catholic theologians have treated the crucial issues of scriptural revelation and inspiration, as well as the relationship between Scripture and tradition. Karl Rahner, the most influential Catholic theologian of our time, embodies this new Roman Catholic theology.

ESSAY 4

ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY TODAY

Robert B. Strimple

Other chapters in this volume address certain themes as they are treated in Roman Catholic theology today: Mary, sacerdotalism, moral theology and public ethics, and a newer conservative ecumenism that includes the present evangelical-Roman Catholic dialogue in North America. In a generally nontheological age, evangelical laity and clergy alike are particularly unaware of the trends and direction of Roman Catholic theology in the late twentieth century. This lack of knowledge presents some significant problems when we begin to think that newer Catholicism is more evangelical in its outlook than pre-Vatican II thought. Here we shall take both a much broader look at the diversity of Roman Catholic theology today and a deeper look at some of its fundamental premises and central concerns.'

THEOLOGY AND MAGISTERIUM

Our focus is professional Roman Catholic theology, that is, our concern is with what the professors of theology in the leading Roman Catholic universities and seminaries are teaching—and particularly what they are writing. No scientific polls have been attempted to take the religious “pulse” of the “typical Roman Catholic in the pew,” so to speak, or to ask what he or she is thinking theologically—although that will certainly be strongly influenced by what the parish priest has learned from his seminary professors and from the theology books he continues to read; and it is well to remember that the large majority of priests today have received their education since Vatican II (1963-1965).

Nor are we speaking here of the official teaching, or dogma, of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. Protestants do not always appreciate sufficiently, perhaps, the significant distinction that Rome makes between the theologians on the one hand and the magisterium on the other.

The magisterium is that teaching authority committed to the church, but in a special sense to the bishops of the church, and in a most special sense to the Roman bishop, the pope. The official teaching of the magisterium is that teaching that is binding on all members of the church (although the extent of the binding chararcter of particular pronouncments is a matter of ongoing debate); and as exercised by a pope or ecumenical council it may even be infallible. On the other hand, the teaching of Catholic theologians, while instructive (it is hoped) to the magisterium, is merely the teaching of individuals—private, fallible, and nonbinding. (To emphasize this distinction is not to overlook that one may, of course, be both a bishop and a theologian.)

The reader might well conclude, therefore, that since what the theologians are saying today is not as authoritative (not binding as the documents of Vatican II are) it is not as important. True enough in a sense; but certainly it is no less interesting, and it is of great influence on the thought and practice of many of the Roman Catholic faithful. Indeed, most (Roman Catholics as well as Protestants) find reading Karl Rahner, Eduard Schillebeeckx, Gustavo Gutierrez, or Richard McBrien, much more stimulating than reading the conciliar documents because, as George Lindbeck (a Lutheran observer at Vatican II) put it in his 1970 reflection on The Future of Roman Catholic Theology (in terms betraying his own theological orientation): “Vatican II represents a transitional phase in a movement which began long before it was convoked and will continue to develop far into the future. ... Its documents are often compromises between stale and tired ways of thinking and fresh and vital ones.”² That is, the statements finally approved by Vatican II are typical consensus documents. Some of the language seems to be deliberately ambiguous, and much appears rather bland, requiring to be “fleshed out” if its significance is to be made clear.

The theologian, on the other hand, need not present a synthesis position. His statements need please no one but himself; and he can make flat-out, bald, bold, “creative,” innovative statements. That is not true without exception. If the Catholic theologian steps too far out of line, particularly if he challenges Roman authority too directly, he can face official discipline—the most well-known cases since Vatican II involving Hans Kung (Germany), Leonardo Boff (Brazil), and Charles Curran (United States). But within exceedingly broad—to evangelical Protestant minds, perhaps amazingly broad— parameters it remains true that Roman Catholic theologians have free rein to express their theological conclusions.

A POST-ENLIGHTENMENT THEOLOGY

Contemporary Roman Catholicism presents a theological landscape so vast and diverse that it may seem impossible to find the forest for the trees. Indeed, the Roman church may seem to be so large, encompassing such theological variety, that the correct answer to eveiy question along the lines of “Is such-and-such a theological position found in Roman Catholicism today?” is probably yes! Yet it does seem possible, and important, to discern one primary current in the Roman Catholic theological stream in this century; namely, the desire to bring the churcII’s theology into harmony with the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment.

That concern first came to the fore at the beginning of the twentieth century in the writings of a diverse group of Roman Catholic theologians and biblical scholars whose work was labeled “Modernism” and was immediately and vigorously suppressed by Pope Pius X in the encyclicals Lamentabili sane (July 3, 1907) and Pascendi dominici gregis (September 8, 1907) and by the imposition of the Anti-Modernist Oath on September 1, 1910, requiring its affirmation by all priests at their ordination.³

The concern to produce a Christian theology that could be viewed as truly relevant to the outlook of the modern world emerged again in the 1930s and 1940s, especially among such French theologians as Marie-Dominique Chenu (the theologian of the worker-priest movement), Yves Congar (who proposed what might be called a “back to the future” approach by studying the earliest sources of the churcII’s faith—the method of Ressourcement —in order to recover that purity of doctrine that the church must apply to the needs of every age), and Henri de Lubac (through whose efforts previously unpublished works by the highly influential Maurice Blondel and Teilhard de Chardin appeared).

The crucial event letting loose in Roman Catholic theology the flood tide of modern thought that had been held back for four hundred years (that is, since the Council of Trent) was Vatican II, thus fulfilling Pope John XXUI’s goal of bringing the church “up-to-date” (achieving aggiornamento). Monika Hellwig explains the theological turmoil of the three decades since as the inevitably stormy process of assimilating the radical intellectual changes that had taken place in the world since the Reformation, particularly since the Enlightenment.⁴

The German Aufklarung (Enlightenment) was the philosophical product in the mid-eighteenth century of the earlier English Deism and French rationalism. Its leading figure was Immanuel Kant, whom many consider to have an even stronger claim than Descartes to be considered the father of modern philosophy. Kant defined the Enlightenment very briefly and simply as the release of man’s reasoning from all external authority. The keynote of Enlightenment thought was the principle of human autonomy. At the end of the next century Ernst Troeltsch spelled out the results for historical and theological method of ultimate reliance on reason alone in terms of the principle of analogy (all historical events are in principle—in “quality”—similar; and thus “present experience and occurrence become the criteria of probability in the past”⁵) and the principle of correlation (all historical phenomena exist in a chain of cause and effect; they are mutually interrelated and interdependent, and there is no effect without an adequate and sufficient cause).

The problems raised by such philosophical presuppositions for a historical, biblical Christian faith should be evident. Those methodological premises would seem to eliminate from consideration a priori (that is, prior to any serious examination or analysis) the fundamental truth claims of Christianity—the very possibility of special divine revelation, of miracles (including the miracle of a bodily resurrection), of any direct divine activity in human history.

And yet a contemporary mainstream Roman Catholic theologian like Hellwig praises the great achievement of postconciliar theologians in making peace between the Christian faith and “modern philosophies with emphasis on reason rather than authority, on the human rather than the divine or the cosmos, on individuals rather than communities, on evolutionary rather than static conceptions of reality, on subjectivity rather than claims to be objective, and so forth.”⁶ J. A. DiNoia, O.P., is more critical of the direction of Roman Catholic theology today; but in an article reflecting on “American Catholic Theology at Century’s End,”⁷ he summarizes that direction similarly by stating that “American Catholic theology increasingly displays a typically modern profile.” In such a theology “faith tailors its claim with an eye to prevailing canons of reasonability and applicability.” DiNoia helpfully summarizes the characteristic concerns of such a theology as follows:

the primacy of the category of experience—whether religious or common human experience ... the centrality of theological anthropology; universalism in the doctrine of revelation; pluralism in the attitude to other religions; insistence on the historically conditioned nature of formulations of the faith; the ascendancy of historical-critical approaches to the study of Scripture; antipathy to doctrinal norms; the centrality of critique and dissent with reference to the tradition and magisterium.

The conservatism of the present pope and of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly designated the Holy Office) headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and the discipline exercised in recent years against a very few theologians, may have dampened the optimistic fires of progressive Roman Catholic theologians a bit; but the fundamental new direction taken by Catholic theology in the years immediately before and after Vatican II has not been diverted. The patient attitude and long-term perspective of many Catholic theologians and biblical scholars is that expressed by highly regarded Raymond E. Brown in response to a question following a public lecture at Mt. St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, in September 1990: “This pope too will pass.” In 1972 David Wells asked the question: “Who speaks for Rome today? Who, then, should I read to build up a composite picture of what Catholics now believe?” And he concluded: “I have allowed progressives rather than conservatives to state contemporary belief. . . . The future is not in the hands of the conservatives.”⁸1 believe this assessment remains true.⁹

There continue, of course, to be Roman Catholic theologians who expound and defend a traditionalist, Tridentine, neoscholastic Catholic faith. In the United States some of these joined with other conservative Roman Catholic scholars in various fields to form the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1977. (On the other hand, most of the professors of theology in the leading Roman Catholic institutions in the United States and Canada are members of The Catholic Theological Society of America, an association thoroughly committed to the kind of “progressive,” “updated” theology that represents the “mainstream” in Roman Catholic theology today.) Among the Tridentine Catholics who have become best known by evangelical Protestants in recent years are Karl Keating (director of the anti-Protes-tant apologetics organization Catholic Answers and author of Catholicism and Fundamentalism^l0) and Scott Hahn (former Presbyterian Church in America pastor, now professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and author of Rome Sweet Home¹¹).

In debate with such traditionalist Catholics the most important issues to be addressed continue to be the crucial issues at the heart of the Reformation, in particular the Bible as the only infallible and absolutely authoritative rule of faith and life (sola scriptura) and justification by faith alone in Christ alone and on the ground of His imputed righteousness alone. (See chapter 11 by Michael Horton.)

Evangelical Protestants must recognize, however, what such conservative Roman Catholics themselves recognize: that they form the “orthodox minority” (Keating) in the Catholic church.¹² And when orthodox Protestants enter into debate with those who now form the majority of professional Catholic theologians, the issues addressed must be the even more radically fundamental ones relating to the meaning of every affirmation of the historic faith of the Christian church: that is, regarding the nature of God and of man, the understanding of a “fall” in human history and of “sin” as transgression of divinely revealed law (indeed, the very possibility of special, direct supernatural revelation of Creator to creature), the definition of “salvation” through the redemptive work of a truly unique Savior, the incarnate Son of God, and of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, and so on.

COMPARISON WITH MODERN PROTESTANT THEOLOGY

Establishing intellectual rapprochement between the Christian faith and modern (post-Kantian) thought has been the goal of many Protestant theologians ever since Friedrich Schleiermacher published his Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers in 1799. One way to characterize the history of Roman Catholic theology in the past fifty years is to suggest that what Catholic theologians have done in large measure is to recapitulate the mean-derings of modern Protestant theology at an extremely rapid rate, condensing the developments of the last two centuries into a few decades. Since World War II (many would point specifically to 1943 and Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, which sanctioned for the first time, though rather cautiously, the use of critical methods by Roman Catholic biblical scholars) the monolithic character of Roman Catholic theology (though always somewhat exaggerated by Protestants perhaps) has been progressively broken up, until we have now reached the point at which the Catholic theological picture presents just as much variety as the Protestant one. Theological pluralism (now moving increasingly toward recognition of the validity of religious pluralism) is today the clearest fact of theological life in the Roman Catholic Church.

The theological situation in the Roman Catholic Church in recent years closely parallels the situation in the Protestant churches. In Protestantism the “dialectical” or “neoorthodox” theology introduced in Europe after World War I by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner also largely won the field from the earlier Ritschlian Liberalism in the United States in the years immediately following World War II. Roman Catholicism in the past half-centuiy has had its neoorthodox theologians also, in particular Hans Urs von Balthasar and the earlier Hans Kung.¹³

The lead in Protestant theology by the late fifties had passed to Rudolf Bultmann and his disciples, in terms of both Bultmann’s form critical method of biblical criticism and his existentialist reinterpretation of theology. Form Criticism has now been practiced by an entire generation of Roman Catholic biblical scholars also;¹⁴ and the great influence of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of existentialism, to which Bultmann was so indebted, is evident in the thinking of such leading Catholic theologians as Yves Congar, Karl Rahner, and Eduard Schillebeeckx. Indeed, Schillebeeckx has called Heidegger “the philosopher behind the whole of modern theology,” even as Aristotle had been the philosopher behind the theology of Thomas Aquinas, which had earlier reigned in Catholicism for so many centuries.¹⁵

In the sixties the popular themes among so-called “mainstream” Protestants were the “theology of secularization” (Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God and Harvey Cox’s The Secular ) and “situation ethics.” Among Roman Catholics, the faculty of St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto published a symposium supporting The New Morality, and St. Michael’s professor Leslie Dewart wrote a book on The Future of Belief (dubbed by conservative critics “The Future of Unbelief”) that touched off a Future of Belief Debate.¹⁶

So also the theologies of the seventies and eighties have had not only Roman Catholic “representatives” but in some cases Roman Catholic leadership. The “theology of hope” was set forth by the Lutherans Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg; but of even more lasting significance has been the closely related “political theology” of the European Roman Catholic theologians Johannes B. Metz and Eduard Schillebeeckx, which gave rise to the liberation theologies presented by such Latin American Roman Catholics as Gustavo Gutierrez and Juan Luis Segundo.

Catholicism has a group of theologians significantly influenced by linguistic analysis philosophy, which includes Eduard Schillebeeckx (who at one time or other has taken up the emphases of virtually every school of contemporary philosophy) and the American David Tracy.

Theologians in the Roman Catholic Church have also brought a renewed emphasis on mysticism and a growing interest in Eastern religions—the monk Thomas Merton, for example, as well as such a respected academic theologian as Eduard Schillebeeckx, whose theme for his 1986 Abraham Kuyper Lectures at the Free University of Amsterdam was the need for Christian faith to express itself in both mysticism and politics, the otherworldly interest combined with the very-much-this-worldly.

Throughout the years since Vatican II the evolutionary theology set forth by the Jesuit priest, paleontologist, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has continued to be of immense significance, in spite of the Vatican’s attempt to silence him. Not only is Teilhard’s influence evident in such a Roman Catholic venture into process theology as Eulalio Baltazar’s God Within Process but also in the thinking of the most important Roman Catholic theologian of our time, Karl Rahner, whose theology we shall briefly introduce in the closing section of this chapter.

We have thus come to the point today where the differences between the most academically respectable theologians of the “mainline” Protestant churches and the professors of theology in the leading Roman Catholic institutions have ceased to matter very much; current theological symposia include chapters written by theologians from both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant ecclesiastical traditions, and the reader must search out the biographical information included somewhere in the volume to discover which writer is a Roman Catholic and which is a Protestant.¹⁷

To note this drawing together of Roman Catholic theology and Protestant theology in the past half-century is not to suggest, however, that Roman Catholic theologians have been merely imitative in these years. In fact, you will find many Protestants insisting that the most original theological work is now being done by Roman Catholics. Already at the time of Vatican II, in acknowledging his indebtedness to Karl Rahner in particular, John Mac-quarrie of Union Seminary (New York) noted that “the leadership in theology, which even ten years ago lay with such Protestant giants as Barth, Brunner and Tillich, has now passed to Roman Catholic thinkers.”¹⁸ In the year of his death (1984), Rahner was hailed as “arguably the most important theologian of the last half of the twentieth century.”¹⁹ And Raymond E. Brown, Roman Catholic New Testament scholar, has often been designated the premier biblical scholar in the United States today.

Fundamental to any theology, of course, is its doctrine of Scripture. In the remaining sections of this chapter, therefore, we shall consider the themes of revelation and inspiration, and the relationship between Scripture and tradition, before closing with a very brief look at the thought of the man perhaps most representative of (certainly the most influential force in) Roman Catholic theology today—Karl Rahner.

SCRIPTURE: REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 

Official Roman Catholic pronouncements regarding biblical inspiration and inerrancy were rather consistently conservative from the affirmations of Trent right up to Vatican II. Trent spoke of recognizing that the “truth and instruction” that “the Son of God first promulgated with His own mouth” is “contained in the written books and in the unwritten traditions, which have been received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself, or from the apostles themselves, at the dictation of the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, Trent spoke of receiving and holding

in veneration with an equal affection of piety and reverence all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament, since one God is the author (auctor) of both, and also the traditions themselves, those that appertain both to faith and to morals, as having been dictated either by Christ’s own word of mouth, or by the Holy Spirit, and preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession.²⁰

The First Vatican Council (1870) strongly reasserted Trent’s high view of inspiration and guarded it from certain erroneous views that had become popular. And during the entire period from Trent down to Vatican II, plenary inspiration and total scriptural inerrancy were repeatedly declared in pontifical statements. Among the most important: Pius IX’s Syllabus Er-rorum in 1864; Leo XHI’s Providentissimus Deus in 1893; Pius X’s Pas-cendi dominici gregis and Lamentabile sane in 1907; Benedict’s XV’s Spiritus Paraclitus in 1920; and Pius Xff’s Divino afflante Spiritu in 1943, although that encyclical is now seen by many as one of the two official statements prior to Vatican II that opened the door for new methods in Roman Catholic biblical studies.

In addition to these papal decrees, a long series of very conservative pronouncements were issued by the Pontifical Biblical Commission after its founding in 1902 on such issues as the authorship of the Pentateuch, the authorship and historical trustworthiness of John’s gospel, deutero-Isaiah, the character of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the authorship and dates of the Psalms, the synoptic problem, the historical accuracy of Acts, and the authorship of several Pauline epistles and of Hebrews. So conservative had the Commission been throughout these years that its 1964 Instruction on the Historical Truth of the Gospels, even though that instruction can seem rather conservative by contemporary critical standards, is now frequently cited as the second decisive step “putting Roman Catholic scholars in line with the Protestant world.”²¹

Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) seems to state the same high view of inspiration as the official ecclesiastical pronouncements that had preceded it.

In light of these official declarations, then, it is understandable why, as J. T. Burtchaell puts it in describing popular opinion four years after Vatican II, “it is still often put round by Catholics and Protestants alike that the official Catholic position on the authority of the Scriptures is a placid and intransigent affirmation of plenary inspiration and total inerrancy.” Burtchaell goes on to note with pleasure, however, that “we are gradually being broken of the habit (common to Catholics and Protestants alike) of thinking that Catholic belief can effortlessly be ascertained by consulting papal and conciliar documents, without troubling to discover whether or not these bespeak a broad consensus.”²²

It is well to emphasize also that it is not simply a matter of how truly representative of Roman Catholic thought those pontifical (and pontifical commission) statements have been; it is also a matter of how those statements have been understood and developed and are now actually used.

In seeking to go beyond a merely superficial view of the contemporary Roman Catholic doctrine of Scripture, we might note again that the 1943 encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu is frequently referred to as the crucial first step in the process of “new thinking” about the Bible in the Roman Catholic Church. The papal crackdown on modernism early in this century had the effect for almost a generation of stifling interest in studying further the nature of biblical inspiration. In Divino afflante Spiritu Pius XII stressed for the first time the need for biblical criticism, for paying heed to the various literary genera found in the Bible, and for interpreting the Bible according to its true intent and purpose; thereby he let loose a pent-up stream of biblical study.

The first scholar to take up the doctrine of inspiration after the appearance of that encyclical was Pierre Benoit, with the publication in 1947 of Aspects of Biblical Revelation. Benoit wished to stand in the Dominican, neo-Thomist tradition of Marie-Joseph Lagrange, who is often hailed today as the “father” of Roman Catholic biblical criticism and who near the end of the nineteenth century put forward a view of “verbal” inspiration in opposition to the Jesuit, Molinist view of merely “content” inspiration.

When evangelical Protestants use the qualifier “verbal” to describe their view of biblical inspiration, they mean to emphasize that the words of the biblical authors are as much “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16) as are the thoughts. But when Lagrange used the adjective “verbal” to describe biWi-cal inspiration, he wished to emphasize that the thoughts were as much man’s as were the words. Thus, in the turn-of-the-century debate in Roman Catholic theology between the advocates of “content” inspiration and the advocates of “verbal” inspiration, it is the latter who represent the more “liberal” or “modernist” position.

Benoit not only desired to stand in that tradition in teaching “verbal” inspiration, he also presented a type of “partial” inspiration, or at least partial revelation, insisting that everything in the Bible is inspired, but not everything is revealed. The reader must distinguish between what is merely affirmed in the Bible and what is taught. This became a most popular theory in the years immediately following Divino afflante Spiritu.

The second study of this doctrine that was most influential in the crucial years leading up to Vatican II was Karl Rahner’s monograph Inspiration in the Bible.²³ As he does in so many of his studies, Rahner (1) begins by affirming, “We . . . assume the traditional teaching of the Church as binding,”²⁴ then (2) states that traditional teaching, and then (3) attempts to explain what that teaching can mean to us today. In the process, as his conservative critics see it, he explains that teaching away.

Rahner sums up the official ecclesiastical doctrine of inspiration in one statement, a statement repeated at Trent, at Vatican I, and at Vatican II: “The Scriptures have God as their author (Deum habent auctorem)." That statement, Rahner says, seems to raise a host of problems; most important (since we know that there have also been human authors of the Scriptures), how can one effect have two causes working at the same level—“in the same dimension,” so to speak?

Rahner seeks, therefore, a simple thesis that will provide a basis for answering that problem and many related ones: That the Scriptures have God as their author is simply one aspect of the fact that the church, and the apostolic church in particular, had God as its “author”—that is, its founder, the one bringing it into being. He says that “in creating through his absolute will the Apostolic Church . . . and her constitutive elements . . . God wills and creates the Scriptures in such a way that he becomes their inspiring originator, their author.” Rahner emphasizes that “the term authorship, therefore, used in regard to God and to man is an analogous concept only.” Is this really all that the Christian church has meant in affirming that the Scriptures have God as their author: that the Bible was one primary element that God used in bringing the church into being, without implying anything more concerning the nature and authority of that Bible?

Many, both within and outside the Roman Catholic Church, have seriously questioned this. Burtchaell, for example, has said that “Rahner has never seriously dealt with the side problem of inerrancy.”²⁵ Though Burtchaell would seem to be justified in questioning how “seriously” Rahner deals with inerrancy, Rahner does mention this matter. Rahner’s “solution” to the problem of inerrancy, however, seems to be neither clear nor convincing. He says that the answer is simply “to limit closely and carefully what the writers really wanted to say.”²⁶

We are in a position now to underscore how the Vatican II statement on revelation stresses that same point. Before doing so, however, reference should perhaps be made to an article by Gabriel Moran, a Christian Brother teaching at Manhattan College, that appeared during the discussions of Vatican II; it well represents the important shift of interest from the nature of inspiration to the nature of revelation. The basic concept of revelation presented by Moran should be kept in mind when we come to our next section and consider contemporary Roman Catholic thinking concerning the relationship between Scripture and tradition.

Moran begins by emphasizing “the need to examine presuppositions when questions of ultimate foundations are raised,” and he insists that nowhere is this more necessary in twentieth-century theology than with regard to the concept of revelation. Contrary to the popular modern Protestant insistence on the significance of the distinction between “the God who acts” and “the God who speaks,” Moran stresses that revelation consists in neither words nor events, neither statements nor history.

Man does not believe in statements or truths, nor does he believe in events; he believes in God revealed in human experience and consciousness.

Certainly, there are words in the process of God’s revealing, but the words spring from reflection upon the prepredicative, prereflexive experience.

There was no way in which God could give “truths” to the prophets (that is, self-contained statements) that would have expressed in an even relatively adequate way what was to be communicated to man. Neither are there events or miracles in Jewish histoiy that can be isolated and understood as “revelations” from God.

Revelation has to do with the most valuable sort of human knowledge, knowledge of a person; and such knowledge, whether of one’s self or of another, is always “radically dependent upon the free bestowal and the free acceptance of that knowledge.”²⁷ In his book on The Theology of Revelation, published immediately following Vatican II, Moran puts it this way: “Revelation in its most basic sense is neither a word coming down from heaven to which man assents nor an historical event manifesting truth. It would be better to begin by conceiving of revelation as an historical and continuing inter-subjective communion in which man’s answer is part of the revelation.” It is for this reason that the Christian believes that the highest revelation is that which existed in the consciousness of Christ, who is “man receiving as well as God bestowing.”

Jesus did not present himself as God speaking truths to be written down and learned by men. ... He recapitulated man in all his levels of uniqueness [note well: man’s uniqueness, not Christ’s] and universality. He is the summation of all that was best in the religious life of mankind. . . . Christ is the first of men [note well: not the only man] whose own existence throws light on all of human existence as it is constituted by a nature that is open upward and perfected in freedom by its nearness to God.²⁸

Thus, “it follows that our supernatural knowledge is a participation in the cognitive experience of Christ.”²⁹ The essentially Hegelian nature of Moran’s Christology seems clear: the divine comes to self-expression in all men and women, not uniquely in one particular historical individual. Jesus of Nazareth was merely that person who discerned with special clarity and fulness of vision the truth about divine/human identity. He was the first to know, when His disciples asked Him to show them the Father, that He could point to Himself. Thus the apostles “as apostles have no successors. . . . They possessed revelation in a fulness not to be surpassed, because they directly experienced the one who expressed what God wished to communicate to the world.”

Moran emphasizes the importance of the new concept of revelation for our understanding of the development of dogma: “It may be noted here that when knowledge is equated with words or even with ideas and judgments, then it becomes impossible to understand the development of dogma in the later Church. . . . There was no set of human statements, written or oral, that could have communicated the apostolic experience of Christ.”³⁰

To the evangelical Christian believer this modern concept of revelation will not seem a promising presupposition from which to develop a biblical doctrine of biblical inspiration. The Bible, according to Moran, represents that original attempt at expression, communication, objectivization, that no significant human experience can avoid “as part of the process of becoming fully human.” Thus, the Bible “originated from the community and was in turn formative of the community.”³¹

Notice the “closed circle” presented here—typical of post-Enlighten-ment thought—as the church gives birth to the Bible and the Bible in turn is formative of the church, with no “breaking into” this circle by God directly “from the outside,” so to speak. Such a historic concept of the “supernatural” nature of either the Bible or Christ is castigated by Moran and other progressive Roman Catholic theologians as “extrinsicism,” using the disparaging label that harks back to Maurice Blondel (1861-1941), whose philosophy was such an important influence on later Roman Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan in proposing “im-manentism” as the true route to “transcendence.”

To sum up, then, revelation, Moran insists, cannot be put into a book. It cannot be “stated.” It can only be witnessed to. How it can be witnessed to, however, remains very much a mystery. As already noted, “there was no set of human statements, written or oral, that could have communicated the apostolic experience of Christ.” The best that Moran can offer, it seems, is that revelation comes through the fulness of the churcII’s life: “If one asks where this revelation continues to exist, the answer would seem to be: in the consciousness of the believers in Christ, that is, in the life and consciousness of the Church as the continuation of Christ.”³² Since the content of that consciousness cannot be expressed, however, either to others or to oneself, it would seem that an ultimate irrationalism (a modern mysticism?) lies at the root of this theology.

Turning now to the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” published by Vatican II, this document (as mentioned above) seems to state the same high view of inspiration as the official Roman Catholic ecclesiastical declarations that had preceded it. It is well to underscore the words “seems to,” however, because (as many have noted) it is important to remember, when interpreting what is said in this document about inerrancy, that in the council debate rejecting the original draft document proposed by the Theological Commission and approving the final document several bishops spoke of the “errors” in the Bible as the reason the new draft was needed. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suggest that the statement finally approved must be understood as saying something different regarding inerrancy from what had been said in the first draft.

It will be helpful to quote here at some length from chapter ΙII of the Constitution:

Holy Mother Church, relying on the belief of the apostles, holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. . . they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself. In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and qualities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.

Therefore, since everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit, it follows that the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation. . . . However, since God speaks in sacred Scripture through men in human fashion, the interpreter of sacred Scripture, in order to see clearly what God wanted to communicate to us, should carefully investigate what meaning the sacred writers really intended, and what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.³³

Regarding what is said here about inerrancy, R. A. F. MacKenzie, Canadian Jesuit and Old Testament scholar, in footnote 31 in the Abbott edition, draws special attention to that key clause at the end of the first sentence in the second paragraph quoted above. He understands it as limiting what in Scripture is said to be “without error” to “that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation”:

It is only in this respect that the veracity of God and the inerrancy of the inspired writers are engaged. This is not a quantitative distinction, as though some sections treated of salvation (and were inerrant), while others gave merely natural knowledge (and were fallible) [contrary to certain earlier doctrines of “partial inspiration,” as affirmed, for example, by John Henry Cardinal Newman]. It is formal and applies to the whole text [and is thus an affirmation of “(denary,” or “verbal,” inspiration]. The latter is authoritative and inerrant in what it affirms about the revelation of God and the history of salvation.

Another prominent Roman Catholic biblical scholar who thinks that “at Vatican II the Catholic Church ‘turned the corner’ in the inerrancy question” is Raymond E. Brown.³⁴ Brown refers to the “real struggle” going on in Roman Catholic theology today as the struggle “between the Catholic center [where he places himself] and the Catholic far-right,” both of whom accept that the Bible is the Word of God, but who differ regarding “the meaning of that doctrine. ”

Brown suggests that it is essential to a proper reading of official documents of the Roman Catholic Church to realize “that the Roman Catholic church does not change her official stance in a Hunt way. Past statements are not rejected but are requoted with praise and then reinterpreted at the same time.”

That would seem to be an accurate and important observation, and one not typically grasped by the average evangelical reader of modern Catholic thought. The question that remains open to debate, however, is whether or not Brown’s statement here describes exactly what he himself does with regard to the declaration of Vatican II. Is Brown to be read as requoting Vatican II with praise but then reinterpreting its statements regarding Scripture and moving them further to the theological “left” than the council really intended to go?

The particular “spin” Brown puts on the understanding of the churcII’s affirmation that the teaching of the Bible is without error to the extent that that teaching relates to God’s salvific purpose is the distinction he introduces between “what the biblical word meant and what it means.” Brown reads the last sentence in the section quoted above from Vatican II as drawing a contrast between “what meaning the sacred writers . . . intended” and “what God wanted to manifest by means of their words.”

Brown says that what a particular text of Scripture meant is what the biblical author intended it to mean, but that is not what is normative (the rule for faith and life) for the church today. Critical study of the Bible “points to religious limitations and even errors” in the Bible. (Note that well: not simply historical or scientific errors.) And this, Brown says, is exactly what we should have expected (a priori) to find in the Bible as far as the original, intended teaching of its authors is concerned—error, even religious error— because “only human beings speak words,” God does not write books,³⁵ and to err is human.

This is no minor issue, because if God did not actually speak words (external or internal), one must admit clearly and firmly that every word pertaining to God in story of the human race, including the biblical period, is a time-conditioned word, affected by limitations of human insight and problems.

This is viewed by contemporary “centrist” Roman Catholic theologians as perhaps the most important insight of modern Roman Catholic theology: the full recognition of the “historicity,” that is, the “time-conditioned” character of all human statements, including those found in the Bible— which points to the limitations, the errors, the less-than-full-and-forever adequacy of those statements.

If what the Bible meant is not without error and cannot be what the Bible means for the life and faith of the church today, where is that meaning to be found? Brown answers:

I would contend that the way in which the Church in its life, liturgy, and theology comes to understand the Bible is constitutive of “biblical meaning,” because it is chiefly in such a context that this collection is serving as the Bible for believers. ... It is crucial that we be aware that the church interpretation of a passage and the literal sense of that passage may be quite different.

But if what the Bible normatively means for the Christian today is not what it originally meant (as determined by careful historico-grammatical exegesis), how can that presently normative (authoritative) biblical meaning be discovered? Brown gives the distinctively Roman Catholic answer: “For me the principle that the teaching office [the magisterium] of the Church can authentically interpret the Bible is more important now than ever before, granted the diversity and contrariety among biblical authors uncovered by historical criticism.”

It is frequently alleged that the Roman Catholic Church offers its members certainty regarding what they are to believe to a degree that the Protestant churches can never offer. It would be theologically naive, however, to think that all our problems in the area of faith have been resolved once the Roman Catholic Church (the magisterium) has proclaimed the meaning for the church today, because while Brown insists that there can be, of course, no differences among Roman Catholics as to what the official Catholic doctrines are (all Catholics must submit to the judgment of the magisterium regarding that), he must acknowledge that “there are sharp differences in the way doctrines are understood.”

And is that not the important thing after all? If it is the task of the biblical scholars to tell us what the Bible meant (which on Brown’s principles seems to be of merely historical interest) and the task of the official magisterium of the church to tell us what the Bible means for the church today, it is left to the theologians to tell us how that meaning is to be understood. And as we have stressed earlier in this chapter, the clearest characteristic of Roman Catholic theology today is pluralism—with vastly different conceptions proposed for every element of the Christian faith and life. Of what value is a purely formal official statement of the “meaning” of the Christian faith without an understanding of what that meaning means? And what can determine for us which understanding is correct if the original, intended meaning of the Bible is not our criterion? What then becomes our norma normans non normata (to use the Reformers’ phrase, “the measuring measure, itself unmeasured”) if not the Bible?

And, of course, it is not only that church members, even theologians, understand official church dogma differently; it is also the case, as Brown and other modern Roman Catholics see it, that that official dogma itself is time-conditioned and severely limited as far as being without error is concerned. In that regard church dogma leaves the modern Christian with an authority no more infallible than the Bible. And Brown acknowledges this: “Even the doctrinal statements of the Church are, in a sense, time-conditioned.” Brown emphasizes that “today the centrist position is securely within the boundaries of Catholic thought loyal to the magisterium); but the result is that the Roman Catholic believer is left without a sure and certain “living voice of God (viva vox dei)."

We must remember and take to heart the answer of the Westminster Confession of Faith to those in the seventeenth century seeking the security of possessing the “living voice of God”: “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture” (I:x). Notice the present tense (“the Holy Spirit speaking”)—the Bible is no “dead letter”—and the affirmation of where the voice of the Spirit is to be heard (“in the Scripture”).

Avery Dulles is an example of a Roman Catholic theologian who wishes to be quite contemporary and ecumenical but who continues to assert the traditional Catholic criticism of Protestantism: “Deprived of any authoritative tradition, [Protestants] have been constrained to breathe life into the dead records.”³⁶ Raymond Brown, however, has shown that the Catholic contention that the present voice of the magisterium transcends the problem of historic conditioning that allegedly plagues the Bible is a false hope. Brown insists that “fidelity to Catholic doctrine is not narrow or confining and, when understood properly, allows plenty of room to think.” Our question, however, must be: Does it allow any room for true certitude and full assurance? This was the tremendous problem the Reformers had with the theology of the Roman church, and the problem continues with the same force for Rome today.

SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION

Many, both Protestants and Catholics, have viewed the question of the relationship between Scripture and tradition as no longer an issue dividing Protestants from the church of Rome.³⁷ Even before Vatican II, Jean Cardinal Danielou said that “a more accurate understanding on the part of Catholics of the agreement between Scripture and tradition does away with the principal Protestant objection to the Catholic position.”³⁸ And G. C. Ber-kouwer was one of many Protestant observers greatly encouraged by the council’s debate of this matter.³⁹

What has been viewed as so significantly new in our generation is the denial by the leading Roman Catholic theologians of so-called “constitutive” tradition, which may be defined as tradition that is objective, divine, apostolic, dogmatic, but not contained in any sense in the Bible.⁴⁰ All the best-known Catholic theologians now agree that there is no doctrinal revelation that is not found (at least implicitly) in the Scriptures. There is no doctrinal revelation that has come to us for the very first time in tradition.

The question at issue here is carefully and narrowly limited and is precisely focused. The pre- and post-Vatican II debate does not address the matter of “disciplinary” tradition—that is, the whole wide area of church rituals and church practices. It has not been denied that tradition has been an original source for such. Nor has modern Roman Catholic theology cast any doubt upon the so-called “formal insufficiency” of Scripture—that is, the fact that the Bible is not sufficient in itself to give anyone a knowledge of God’s will, because that cannot be understood apart from the Catholic churcII’s authoritative interpretation of the Scripture. Sola Scriptura in the Protestant sense has not been affirmed. The discussion in the Roman Catholic Church has dealt only with the question of the material sufficiency or insufficiency of Scripture, the question as to whether there are revealed dogmatic truths that can be known only through tradition.

The impression has frequently been left, however, that if the Roman Catholic theologian rejects the notion of constitutive tradition (and the large majority today do), then the Protestant has no further objection on the subject of the role of tradition. This is a false conclusion. But our critique of the contemporaiy Roman Catholic doctrine of the relationship between Scripture and tradition cannot end there.

The key figure in the Roman Catholic debate has been Josef Rupert Gei-selmann. It was Geiselmann who challenged in a definitive way (though he appealed to others who saw the primary point clearly before him, particularly among his predecessors at the University of Tubingen) the so-called “two-source” view of revelation that was the traditional Catholic view of the relationship between Scripture and tradition.

The traditional Catholic understanding of revelation was that revelation is contained partly in the Scripture and partly in tradition; that is, there are revealed dogmatic troths that can be known only through tradition. That “partly—partly” understanding came to explicit expression in the original wording proposed at the Council of Trent: “this troth is contained partly in written books, partly in unwritten traditions.” Geiselmann sees it as quite significant, however, that that original construction was rejected at the Fourth Session of the Council of Trent. The two “partly”s were deleted and replaced with a simple “and” so that the statement approved was simply the affirmation that divine troth is contained in the written Scriptures and in unwritten traditions.⁴¹ Geiselmann’s conclusion is that that affirmation was a compromise formula and “nothing, absolutely nothing, was decided at the Council of Trent concerning the relation of Scripture and Tradition.”⁴²

Vatican II evidently chose to take the same route and not come down on one side or the other of this issue. The original draft of the “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” contained a first chapter titled “Two Sources of Revelation.” This was replaced by two chapters, the first on “Revelation Itself” and the second on “The Transmission of Divine Revelation.” R. A. F. MacKenzie, in his “Introduction” to this constitution in the Abbott edition, is no doubt correct in concluding that Vatican II did not explicitly adopt Geiselmann’s view; but that view certainly prevented the council from explicitly enunciating the “two sources” view.

When we examine Geiselmann’s own doctrine of revelation, however, and his answers to his traditionalist critics, we discover that his theology is rooted so firmly in a modern, post-Kantian view of revelation that his denial that there is any revelation that comes for the first time in tradition and his affirmation that the whole of the gospel is found in Scripture—though that denial and that affirmation on the surface have seemed so encouraging to so many Protestants—are actually farther from the orthodox Protestant understanding of revelation and of Scripture than the traditional Catholic position and are calculated not to support a biblical understanding of divine revelation but to destroy it.

Geiselmann emphasizes that we must reject the fundamentalists’ notion of the Scriptures as revelation, as “a gift by God of a bonus of truths.”⁴³ Scripture is actually two levels removed from revelation. Revelation is to be seen as the fundamental reality, the “real reality,” which is at the heart of our religious experience; that is, the self-communication of God. Christians speak of that as the Christ Event. That Event is God’s revelation, or God’s Tradition with a capital “T,” God’s paradosis of the Son (that Greek word we translate “tradition” literally means “handing over”).

That Event was proclaimed in the original gospel preaching, or (to use the Greek word for “preaching” found in the New Testament) the kerygma. That gospel, that kerygma, is not itself revelation but is rather a human reflection on and an interpretation of the revelation, the Christ Event. That original gospel proclamation has later been recorded in the Scripture and in tradition, both of which are, according to Geiselmann, “modes of existence within the Church of the one Gospel of Jesus Christ.”⁴⁴

The church is Christ’s continuing presence, God’s continuing tradition, God’s continuing handing over of His Son. Therefore, although Geiselmann speaks here of “Church, Scripture, and tradition” (note the order) forming “a coherent whole,” the fact is that in his view the three are not really coordinate; the church is all.

In Geiselmann’s view, the contemporaiy Roman Catholic view, neither Scripture nor tradition is revelation, the Word of God in the full sense and therefore absolutely authoritative. Both Scripture and tradition are the human record of and witness to revelation, and thus a guide to the church. This is precisely why I am convinced that the theological situation in the Roman Catholic Church today must be viewed as worse than it was at the time of the Reformers. (But, of course, this is also why hope has been expressed for eventual ecumenical unity between progressive Roman Catholics and modernist Protestants.) A simple diagram may prove helpful:

The Reformers condemned the exaltation of tradition to the level of authoritative divine revelation, but we cannot praise a more modest estimate of tradition if it entails a like devaluation of the absolute authority of Scripture. We are not to distinguish between revelation and inspiration as though they were two altogether different kinds of reality. Rather, we are to see inspiration as one mode of divine authoritative revelation and, indeed, that mode “most necessary” for the church today, “those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased” (Westminster Confession of Faith, I:i).

In other words, Scripture is not simply a later pointer to or radiation from or interpretation of the history of redemption. God’s giving of this authoritative written Scripture is part of the history of redemption. Our reliance upon Scripture alone is not because we see this collection of Christian writings simply as the first interpretation of the Christ Event and, therefore, as in some sense perhaps the best interpretation. (Recall our earlier consideration of Rahner’s view of the Bible.) Our recognition of the unique authority of Scripture rests on the recognition that Scripture’s interpretation is not simply the first or the best; it is God’s.

Before concluding our consideration of Geiselmann, it should be noted that the major portion of his study The Meaning of Tradition is actually occupied with a theme that we have not touched on thus far. It is, however, a theme that reveals the truly Roman Catholic nature of Geiselmann’s theology and its distance from a biblical emphasis on the uniqueness of the gospel, the exclusive character of the Christian faith and the indispensable necessity of Scripture if sinners today are to have “that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary to salvation” (Westminster Confession of Faith, I:i).

That theme to which Geiselmann devotes greatest attention is “the nature of religious tradition as a universal human reality which attains its highest perfection in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”⁴⁵ Geiselmann is in full agreement with the universalistic tendency that has always been present in Roman Catholic thought, the notion that Christianity only exemplifies at its highest what is true for all men everywhere at all times. Geiselmann says that not only Catholics but Protestants are discussing “natural tradition . . . which forms the basis of supernatural tradition. . . . Without this natural tradition rooted in the nature of man, supernatural tradition based on revelation would lack any firm point of contact in man and would, as it were, remain in the air.”⁴⁶

In such a Catholic nature/grace perspective there is no recognition of the fact that natural tradition is sinful, Creator-rejecting (Romans 1), and that scriptural revelation is necessitated by man’s sin and is not simply the complement or supplement to what he has in natural tradition.

KARL RAHNER: TWENTIETH CENTURY THEOLOGIAN

One way to taste the flavor of Roman Catholic theology today is to consider how the fundamental presuppositions that have been our concern have been applied in the thought of one particularly influential theologian. Making the choice of which theologian to consider is not difficult. In the estimation of contemporary Catholics, as well as many Protestants, Karl Rahner is “arguably the most important theologian of the last half of the twentieth century.”⁴⁷ Anne Carr, University of Chicago, says that “Rahner’s influence on Catholic thought has been enormous.”⁴⁸ The Reformed theologian, George Vandervelde, considers this “Holy Ghost writer of the Second Vatican Council” to be “the most brilliant theologian since Thomas Aquinas” and insists that “any theologian worth the name must come to grips with his thought.”⁴⁹

Some traditionalist Roman Catholic theologians, of course, while acknowledging Rahner’s influence, have lamented it as the influence of a heretic. Paul D. Molnar, St. John’s University (New York), agrees with the Jesuit Martin R. Tripole that Rahner’s Transcendental Thomism is actually an attempt to reduce theology to philosophy and concludes that Rahner “cannot in reality distinguish God from the world.”⁵⁰ Malachi Martin is extremely caustic in his criticism: “Celebrated as the greatest Jesuit theologian in one hundred years,” Rahner actually “wrote and lectured . . . with subtle logic and passionless mind to unlimber the dearest held tenets of faith in the minds of his readers and listeners.”⁵¹

Born on March 5, 1904, Rahner entered the Society of Jesus in 1922, studied Thomism at the University of Freiburg—where he also participated in seminars led by the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger—in 1964 accepted the chair of Christian Worldview and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Munich, and died in Innsbruck on March 30, 1984. His more than 3,500 published items consist mainly of occasional essays, many of them collected in English translation as Theological Investigations.⁵²

Rahner is not an easy read. Mark Schoof refers to his “inordinately long sentences” and “his almost discouraging productivity” covering an exceedingly wide range of subjects, from the deeply theological to the apparently mundane.⁵³ Rahner presents a Thomism understood in terms of modern German philosophy (in particular of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger), but also under the influence of such French Transcendentalists as Maurice Blondel and Joseph Marechal. Thus, the reader needs a broad knowledge of modern philosophy in order to totally comprehend Rahner.

At the same time, contemporary Roman Catholic “moderates”⁵⁴ such as Avery Dulles and Richard McBrien view Rahner as clearly in harmony with such fundamental emphases of historic Catholicism as (1) the recognition that God’s redemptive plan extends “to the whole of humanity and even to the inanimate material world”⁵⁵—the universalistic note is one of the most dominant in Rahner’s thought—and (2) “ radical openness to all truth and to every value.”⁵⁶ Dulles reminds us that “theologically speaking, Catholicism is characterized ... by a both/and rather than an either/or approach”: nature/grace, reason/faith, law/gospel, Scripture/tradition, faith/works, authority/freedom, past/present, stability/change, unity/diversity—the via media⁵⁷

Anne Carr notes that “the texture and shape of any theology is most clearly suggested by its point of departure.”⁵⁸ In Foundations of Christian Faith, Rahner’s goal is to establish the intellectual respectability and credibility of the Christian faith. Thus, God cannot be his starting-point or presupposition because, as Dych puts it, “in the modern world God is not an answer but part of the problem.”⁵⁹ Similarly, neither Jesus Christ nor the Bible can be the starting-point.

The question may then come: Is there any common starting-point, any “point of contact” between believer and unbeliever? Yes, Rahner answers; that starting-point is our common shared experience of what it means to be human. Therefore, Rahner continually challenges his reader to test what he presents in terms of the reader’s own “existentiell” experience as a human person. The reader is continually challenged to ask, Does what Rahner writes about human existence, as a Christian theologian, “ring true” in terms of my own human existence?

Always we must remember that experiential knowledge, “unthematic” knowledge, is original, first-level knowledge. Conceptual knowledge, “thematic” knowledge, is second-level knowledge. The latter is an attempt to express, to symbolize (in language) the former; but conceptual knowledge is never identical with experiential knowledge, and the norm for its truthfulness must always be experiential knowledge.

This starting-with-the-human approach is what is referred to as Rahner’s “transcendental method,” and his theology is most often referred to as a “Transcendental Thomism.” A Transcendental Thomism is a Thomism in harmony with the principle so basic to all post-Enlightenment thought, and modern Catholic theologians often refer to it as “the turn to the subject,” a reorientation away from the object of knowledge and toward the knowing subject. Catholics most frequently appeal at this point to the writings of Blondel and Marechal earlier in this century; but the revolutionary epistemological “turn” took place earlier in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

J. J. Mueller helpfully notes that, although the term transcendental refers most basically to “the capacity to go beyond ourselves,” since the time of Kant the term has also carried the technical meaning of “grasping the conditions for the possibility of.”⁶⁰ Rahner stresses that it is the transcendental character of the human person—the capacity to go beyond oneself—that makes possible, conceivable, believable the central affirmations of the Christian faith. A person discovers himself or herself to be one who asks questions, not only about his world but about himself—who asks such questions continually, without end. Thus, the “horizon,” the outer limit of his questioning, is infinite.

But such an infinite horizon must have a source, a ground. And that source must be Being, not Nothing, because nothingness grounds nothing. “Logically and existentielly” the questioner “cannot think that the movements of hope and the desire to reach out that he really experiences are only a charming and foolish illusion.”⁶¹ McBrien offers this definition of “transcendental”: “The person is transcendental insofar as the person is oriented beyond himself or herself toward God as the source, sustainer, and final perfection of the person’s existence. ”⁶²

Rahner speaks of certain “existentials” of human experience; that is, “those characteristics or capacities of human existence which make it specifically human and distinguish it from other modes of existence.”⁶³ Those existentials include not only transcendence (the ability always to go beyond oneself, most apparent in one’s questioning) but also self-awareness, per-sonhood and subjectivity (consciousness, freedom, responsibility), intersubjectivity (the fact that our subjectivity is always exercised in relation to other subjects), and dependence.

And to these existentials of human experience Rahner adds another, which he calls “the supernatural existential”—that is, humankind’s existen-tiell orientation toward grace. Grace refers to the divine’s continual offer of self-communication and man’s continual capacity to freely accept that offer. In summarizing Rahner’s thought at this point, McBrien writes, “Every human person has this radical capacity and many, perhaps most, have actualized it by receiving grace. ”⁶⁴

Acceptance and rejection of grace are ... not limited to acts with visibly religious content. They take place in any true exercise of our freedom, even if the specific act seems to have nothing to do with God.

Everything that is really human can be a “channel of grace,” a finite mediation of our relationship to God.⁶³

Rahner thus emphasizes that the only nature that exists is graced nature, nature that is always oriented toward God, with salvation (that is, full unity with the self-giving God) as its goal.

Rahner does attempt to take seriously human freedom and the possibility of sin—even the possibility of ultimate sin and ultimate loss—by stressing the need for a response in faith (although he also emphasizes that the primary and climactic faith-response has already been given by Jesus, the God-man). In the concluding “remarks” in the essay on “Christology Within an Evolutionary View of the World,” Rahner says that “where there is freedom . . . there can also be a guilt and freedom which closes itself against God: there can also be sin and the possibility of perdition. ’^,66

Indeed, in harmony with traditionalist Roman Catholic teaching, Rahner insists that no one may have certitude and assurance in this life regarding his or her eternal salvation, because to make such a claim before the final challenge of accepting one’s own death has been met would be to try to unveil the hiddenness of the future.

Two points, however, need to made clear here. As indicated already, when Rahner speaks of the need for a response of faith, hope, and love, he is never thinking exclusively in terms of an explicitly Christian faith.

Many have encountered Christ who did not know that they had. . . . God and the grace of Christ are present to the secret essence of every reality we can choose.

. . . Consequently, anyone who . . . accepts his existence in patient silence . . . accepts it as the mystery which lies hidden in the mystery of eternal love and ... is saying “yes” to Christ even if he does not know it. . . . Anyone who accepts his humanity fully, and all the more so of course the humanity of others, has accepted the Son of Man because in him God has accepted man.⁶⁷

Probably Rahner is best known, among those who know nothing else about his theology, for the phrase “anonymous Christianity,” which speaks of the fact that grace is present “wherever human life is lived authentically, no matter what words are used to define and describe it.”⁶⁸

This is now recognized to be the generally accepted view in the Roman Catholic Church. Avery Dulles writes, “Contemporary Roman Catholicism, as represented by Vatican Council II, holds that God’s saving grace is operative among all peoples, even the unevangelized.”⁶⁹

Rahner would emphasize, like Eduard Schillebeeckx and other Roman Catholic theologians today, that the church is “the sacrament of the world’s salvation.”⁷⁰ The church is the sign of what is true of the world.

The second point to remember when reading Rahner’s statements regarding the “hidden” character of the future is that Rahner often expresses the hope that very few, if any, will actually make the wrong ultimate choice. He says that the fact that God

himself becomes the world’s innermost life . . . gives us the right to have the courage to believe in the fulfillment of the ascending history of the cosmos and of each individual cosmic consciousness, a fulfillment which consists in the immediate experience of God in the most real and revealing self-communication.⁷¹

Rahner emphasizes that it is because the center of his theology is Chris-tology that his theology is evolutionary and hopeful. Before closing this brief introduction to Rahner’s theology, therefore, we must at least sketch the essentials of his Christology.

Bruce Marshall sees Rahner as wrestling with that most basic problem for Christian faith, which has been “pervasive . . . since the Enlightenment: how can universal and ultimate significance be ascribed coherently to Jesus of Nazareth, a particular person?”⁷²

In the eighteenth centuiy Gotthold Lessing called this question the “ugly ditch” that he could never get across, no matter how earnestly he tried to make the leap: How can the accidental truths of history ever become the proof of necessary truths of reason? Marshall sees Rahner as presenting simply another version of Schleiermacher’s answer; namely, that Jesus Christ is merely “the ideal perfection of the basic condition of which all persons are at least implicitly aware as their own.” And though Marshall grants that Rahner’s version is “brilliantly” executed, he considers it to be “finally unsuccessful.”⁷³

In keeping with his transcendental method, Rahner approaches his task—showing how Jesus Christ, a particular person, can be the unique Redeemer—by identifying those conditions in human experience that make the Christian faith regarding Christ possible, believable. This part of the theologian’s work Rahner refers to as “transcendental Christology.”

But, of course, a demonstration that the Christian doctrines concerning Christ are “existentielly” understandable to human beings “in a deeply meaningful way” does not prove that there actually is such a savior or that that savior is Jesus Christ.⁷⁴ To show that requires a study of the actual Jesus of history and the Christ of the churcII’s faith. This kind of study Rahner refers to as “categorical Christology.” These two approaches to Christology— the “transcendental” and the “categorical”—mutually inform one another.

If a student had to choose just one of Rahner’s essays to read as an introduction to his theology, that one would perhaps be the essay on “Christology Within an Evolutionary View of the World.” Rahner begins that essay by noting that his concern is with “the transcendental possibility for man to take the question of a God-man seriously.” He wants his reader, therefore, to understand clearly that “we are presupposing ... the evolutionary view of the world as a given, and we are asking whether Christology is compatible or can be compatible with it, and not vice versa.”⁷⁵

Rahner then summarizes the conclusions he shall try to establish:

We have to try to understand man as the existent in whom the basic tendency of matter to discover itself in spirit through self-transcendence reaches its definitive breakthrough [again we note the Hegelian thrust of the argument].

The permanent beginning and the absolute guarantee that this ultimate self-transcendence . . . will succeed and has already begun is what we call the “hypostatic union.” . . . From this perspective the Incarnation appears as the necessary and permanent beginning of the divinization of the world as a whole.

. . . insofar as this definitive phase of world history has indeed already begun but is not yet complete, the further course of this phase and its result remain, of course, shrouded in mystery.⁷⁶

The fulfillment of this original goal of all creation Rahner speaks of as “grace.” Clearly for Rahner grace does not necessarily involve God’s undeserved mercy to sinners. In the “remarks” that conclude this essay, Rahner acknowledges that in this study of the Incarnation he has not spoken of “guilt and redemption, i.e., liberation from sin.” And he asks, “Does this mean that we have after all deviated in some unlawful way from the traditional Christology?”⁷⁷

The Pontifical Biblical Commission in its 1984 statement on “The Bible and Christology” suggests that perhaps he has. The Commission links Rahner’s Christology with Teilhard’s and asks this question: “Does the optimistic interpretation of this evolution, aimed at the Omega point,’ allow sufficiently for questions about evil, and for the redemptive activity of the death of Jesus, even if account is otherwise taken of the crises that human evolution is to overcome.”⁷⁸

An interesting and instructive exercise is to follow up the reading of Rahner’s influential essay by reading John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion II:xii: 1-7,⁷⁹ where Calvin deals with the central issue raised by Rahner. Calvin would conclude that Rahner has indeed “deviated” not only from “the traditional Christology” but from a biblical one. Calvin refers to the suggestion of Osiander, a Lutheran, that “Christ would still have become man even if no means of redeeming mankind had been needed”—that is, even if mankind had not disobeyed and fallen in sin—as the kind of “vague speculations that captivate the frivolous and the seekers after novelty.” Calvin insists that “since all Scripture proclaims that to become our Redeemer he was clothed with flesh, it is too presumptuous to imagine another reason or another end. . . . Since we learn that Christ himself was divinely appointed to help miserable sinners, whoever leaps over these bounds too much indulges foolish curiosity” (italics added). Calvin appeals to many specific Scripture texts and then concludes again, “It is quite enough for me to say that all those who propose to inquire or seek to know more about Christ than God ordained ... are breaking out in impious boldness to fashion some new sort of Christ.”

Calvin calls the speculation that the Son of God would have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned “this monstrous thing—which all godly men justly abominate as detestable” and argues that “if Adam’s uprightness had not failed, he . . . would have been like God; and it would not have been necessary for the Son of God to become either man or angel. ” Rather than viewing man as evolving beyond matter into pure spirit and eventual divinization,⁸⁰ Calvin sees man being, as originally created, as much like God as he was ever intended to be! As it has often been expressed, the difference between the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation (both in its traditional form and now in its modern, Rahnerian form) and the Reformed doctrine of salvation is the difference between an ontological concept (man as created needing some “additional” gift) and an ethical one (man’s problem being his disobedience, needing forgiveness and sanctification).

Rahner is eager to explain to his modern audience the ancient Chalcedo-nian doctrine of the hypostatic union (Christ = one person but two natures). This doctrine means, according to Rahner, that “this saviour . . . must be at the same time both the absolute promise of God to spiritual creatures as a whole and the acceptance of this self-communication by the savior.” Thus, the Savior—mark it well—becomes also the Saved: “We are saved because this man who is one of us has been saved by God, and God has thereby made his salvific will present in the world historically, really and irrevocably.

Does Rahner escape the modern, post-Hegelian error of presenting a concept of the Incarnation, the hypostatic union, in which the difference between Jesus’ affirmation, “I and the Father are one,” and my affirmation or your affirmation of the same truth, is simply a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind! He seems to tty valiantly to do so. He repeatedly stresses the “uniqueness” of Jesus Christ. He explicitly denies that the difference between Jesus’ experience of divine intimacy and mine is merely one of degree. Ultimately, however, Rahner cannot maintain that the Hypostatic Union that came to historical expression in Jesus of Nazareth is truly unique. The difference between Jesus and every other human person—at least every one who does not finally reject God’s offer of self-communication—is only the difference between the “already” and the “not yet.” What Jesus is is what we all will be.

Bruce McDermott explains what Rahner means by Jesus’ “uniqueness”: “The hypostatic union happens once in human history. But its uniqueness in no way puts a ceiling, so to speak, on those who are not Jesus; rather it opens up the full plentitude of the divine mystery as the goal and beatitude of all people.”⁸²

In order that the reader may see the correctness of McDermott’s conclusion, some direct quotations from Rahner’s essay may be cited:

But such an ultimate and absolute self-transcendence of the spirit into God is to be understood as taking place in all spiritual subjects.

The intrinsic effect of the hypostatic union for the assumed humanity of the Logos consists precisely and in a real sense only in the veiy thing which is ascribed to all men as their goal and their fulfillment, namely the immediate vision of God which the created, human soul of Christ enjoys. . . . The prerogatives which accrue intrinsically to the human reality of Jesus, through the hypostatic union are of the same essential nature as those which are also intended for other spiritual subjects through grace.

When God brings about man’s self-transcendence into God through his absolute self-communication to all men in such a way which is irrevocable and which has already reached fulfillment in one man, then we have precisely what is signified by hypostatic union.

This union is distinguished from our grace not by what has been offered in it, which in both instances, including that of Jesus, is grace. It is distinguished rather by the fact that Jesus is the offer for us, and we ourselves are not once again the offer, but the recipients of God’s offer to us.⁸³

This last distinction must not be made too sharply, however, because Jesus Himself (Rahner emphasizes elsewhere) is also recipient of God’s grace (as well as the offer of God’s grace).

Dych suggests an illustration that is very helpful for grasping Rahner’s thought:

The history of Jesus can be understood as the fullest actualization ... of the human potential for self-transcendence. . . . Just as the real potentialities of sound are not actual and known until a Beethoven creates his music, so too the real potentialities of human existence are not actual and known until they are actualized in a concrete, historical person. But once this truth is date and achieved and thereby known, in this event there is disclosed a new vision of all human existence, a new hope for everything human. For Christians this is what happened in the life of Jesus.⁸⁴

Notice the words at the beginning of that last sentence: “For Christians ...” Might “the real potentialities of human existence” be disclosed elsewhere for others? Rahner would answer: “Yes. Of course.”

In this essay Rahner has been presenting a “transcendental” Christol-ogy. But, as we previously noted, he recognizes the need for categorical Christology as well, the need to make the case that this savior of the world is Jesus Christ. Hence he engages elsewhere in the study of the historical Jesus, the Christ of the New Testament, and the Christ of the earlier church.

With regard to the so-called “historical” Jesus—the “real” Jesus who actually lived, preached, and died in Palestine—Rahner has been said to accept the findings of “moderate” contemporary biblical criticism. Actually Rahner concludes that New Testament criticism allows us to have confidence regarding the historical factuality of only “what may seem to be minimal details concerning the life of Jesus.”⁸⁵ He insists, however, that “we really only have to prove that two theses are historically credible in order to establish ... the grounds of faith for orthodox Christianity’s whole Christology.⁸⁶ Those two theses that must be proven to be historically credible are (1) that Jesus claimed to be the eschatological Prophet, the definitive Savior, and (2) that Jesus’ claim was vindicated by His resurrection.

The Resurrection, Rahner emphasizes, is not an event in time and space, not an event leaving an empty tomb, but is rather the validation of the person and His life.

Given the non-temporal nature of what happens in the resurrection ... the resurrection does not mean the beginning of a new period in the life of Jesus, a further extension of time filled with new and different things. It means rather and precisely the permanent, redeemed, final, and definitive validity of the single and unique life of Jesus who achieved the permanent and final validity of his life precisely through his death in freedom and obedience.

We miss the meaning of “resurrection” ... if our original preconception is the notion of a resuscitation of a physical, material body.

Faith in his resurrection is an intrinsic element of this resurrection itself. Faith is not taking cognizance of a fact which by its nature could exist just as well without being taken cognizance of. . . . In this sense we not only can but must say that Jesus is risen into the faith of his disciples.

We ourselves experience the resurrection of Jesus in the “Spirit” because we experience him and his “cause” as living and victorious.⁸⁷

CONCLUSION

In this chapter we have been emphasizing that Roman Catholic theology today is, in its leading representatives, a consciously post-Enlightenment theology, the basic presuppositions and concerns of which are the same as those that have motivated Protestant theology in modern times. We have now seen this eloquently reflected in the theology of the most influential Roman Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Rahner. Because modern Roman Catholic theology has imbibed the ethos and spirit of modernity in this century, it is imperative that evangelicals recognize the influence of this spirit and respond more accurately and faithfully to the present situation as it really is. The most significant historic theological affirmations, even those we once agreed on (as we saw in chapter 2), are no longer a basis for agreement. As we have seen in this chapter, every doctrine of our historic Christian faith has been challenged; therefore we must gird up our minds if we are to respond adequately.

Notes

1.    Some of the material in this chapter appeared in the author’s very brief survey of “Roman Catholic Theology Thirty Years After Vatican II” originally published in New Horizons (October 1992): 3-6.

2.    George A. Lindbeck, The Future of Roman Catholic Theology (London: SPCK, 1970), 3.

3.    Malachi Martin (The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987], 328) has expressed the opinion that it was a “Wind” and “foolish” act when, soon after Vatican II in 1967, Pope Paul VI “did away with a universal rule that imposed on all theologians a solemn oath to combat Modernism.”

4.    Monika K. Hellwig, What are the Theologians Saying Now? (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1992), xiv.

5.    Ernst Troeltsch, “Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology (1898),” in Religion in History, trans. James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 55.

6.    Hellwig, What are the Theologians Saying Now? xvi.

7.    The Thomist 54 (1990), 504.

8.    David F. Wells, Revolution in Rome (Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity, 1972), 8, 10, 38.

9.    Eugene Kennedy (Loyola University, Chicago) presents an interesting interpretation of the theological perspective of Roman Catholics in the United States in “this new age” (p. xiii), in Tomorrow’s Catholics, Yesterday’s Church (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990).

10.    Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians” (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988).

11.    Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Rome Sweet Home (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993). Kim Riddlebarger interacts with this book in chapter 10. The Hahns' book is of interest to evangelical Protestants, naturally, in view of their having both studied at Grove City College and at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and having then served in the Presbyterian Church in America; but the book is disappointing in that it provides little by way of theological argumentation and consists exclusively of extended testimony regarding their personal experience.

12.    Hahn, for example, laments the fact that when he decided to seek Roman Catholic theological training he “discovered there really were no Catholic institutions at the time where a layman like me could receive orthodox doctrinal formation in the Catholic Tradition” (Rome Sweet Home, 103).

13.    Hans Kung is often thought by evangelical Protestants to be perhaps the most avant-garde of contemporary Roman Catholic theologians because he had the temerity to deny the infallibility of the church and the pope (as well as the Bible) in his celebrated 1967 book, Infallible? An Inquiry. As a result the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared that Kung “can no longer be considered a Catholic theologian or function as such in a teaching role.” Actually, the Barthian cast of his theology had come to be regarded by that time as rather outdated. In 1974 (English translation, 1976), in what he referred to as his “small summa,” On Being a Christian, Kung proposed to go beyond neoorthodoxy and get in tune with the future-oriented political and liberation theologies then so popular; but, in fact, he seems to revert in that volume to an earlier liberalism.

14.    As an example of form critical dogmatism in current Roman Catholic study of the New Testament, see the lecture on “The Bible as a Source for Theology,” presented at the 1988 convention of The Catholic Theological Society of America by John P. Meier of the Catholic University of America. Meier scathingly criticized such leading liberation theologians as Jon Sobrino and Juan Luis Segundo for their appeals to the historical Jesus in support of their theology, insisting that such professional theologians should know that “the real Jesus ... is no longer accessible to us by scholarly means” (!The Catholic Theological Society of America' Proceedings of the Forty-Third Annual Convention, ed. George Kilcourse [1988], 43:6).

15.    Eduard Schillebeeckx, God the Future of Man, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1968), 14.

16.    This is the title of a book of essays in response to The Future of Belief, edited by Gregory Baum (then teaching at the University of Toronto and now at McGill University in Montreal, whose own book was titled Man Becoming: God in Secular Experience).

17.    For example, The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1987) has a Roman Catholic publisher and is coedited by John Hick, Presbyterian (USA) professor at The School of Theology at Claremont, and Paul F. Knitter, Roman Catholic professor at Xavier University.

18.    John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology (New York: Scribner’s, 1966), ix.

19.    J. J. Mueller, What Are They Saying About Theological Method? (New York: Paul-ist, 1984), 6.

20.    The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferri from the 13th ed. Henry Den-zinger, Enchiriplon Symbolorum (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1957), 244.

21.    Raymond E. Brown, lecture at Mt. St. Mary’s College (Los Angeles), 22 September 1990.

22.    James Tunstead Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration Since 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), 5.

23.    It is difficult to understand why David Wells (Revolution in Rome, 33) has referred to Rahner’s view of biblical inspiration as “less radical” than Kung’s.

24.    Karl Rahner, Inspiration in the Bible, trans. Charles H. Henkey (New York: Herder & Herder, 1961). In this discussion the passages cited from this monograph appear on pp. 9, 16, 50, and 56.

25.    Burtchaell, Catholic Theories, 256.

26.    Rahner, Inspiration in the Bible, 78.

27.    Gabriel Moran, “What Is Revelation?” Theological Studies 25 (June 1964): 218, 225,224,225-26,221.

28.    Gabriel Moran, The Theology of Revelation (New York: Seabury, 1966), 50, 64, 65. In a footnote appended to the last sentence cited here, Moran refers to Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1961-), 1:183-92.

29.    Moran, “What Is Revelation?” 228.

30.    Ibid., 228, 229.

31.    Moran, Theology of Revelation, 87-88, 100.

32.    Moran, “What Is Revelation?” 230.

33.    The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott (New York: Herder & Herder, 1966), 118-20.

34.    Raymond E. Brown, The Critical Meaning of the Bible (New York: Paulist, 1981). The passages cited from Brown appear, in order, on the following pages: pp. 3, 18, 23, 16, 14, 4, 34, 37, 84, 87.

35.    Remember Karl Rahner’s explanation of the metaphorical meaning of the dogmatic statement that the Scriptures have God as their “author.”

36.    Avery Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 96.

37.    In this section, material has been incorporated from the author’s article “The Relationship between Scripture and Tradition in Contemporary Roman Catholic Theology,” Westminster Theological Journal 40 (Fall 1977): 22-38. That same article may be consulted for a brief consideration of the approaches taken by John Henry Cardinal Newman, Karl Rahner, Eduard Schillebeeckx, and Gregory Baum to the important subject of the development of dogma.

38.    Jean Danielou, “Scripture, Tradition and the Dialogue,” Theology Digest 9 (1961), 42.

39.    See G. C. Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, trans. Lewis B. Smedes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), chap. 4.

40.    For a full and helpful discussion of the various kinds of tradition distinguished in traditional Roman Catholic theology, see Gabriel Moran, Scripture and Tradition: A Survey of the Controversy (New York: Herder & Herder, 1963).

41.    Josef R. Geiselmann, “Scripture and Tradition in Catholic Theology,” Theology Digest 6 (1958): 73-78.

42.    Josef Rupert Geiselmann, “Scripture, Tradition, and the Church: An Ecumenical Problem,” in Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological

Issues, ed. Daniel J. Callahan, Heiko A. Oberman, and Daniel J. O’Hanlon (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1964), 47-48.

43.    Ibid., 52.

44.    Ibid., 50.

45.    Josef Rupert Geiselmann, The Meaning of Tradition (London: Burns & Oates, 1966), summary opposite title page.

46.    Ibid., 40.

47.    J. J. Mueller, What Are They Saying About Theological Method? (New York: Paul-ist, 1984), 6.

48.    In A Handbook of Christian Theologians, ed. Dean G. Peerman and Martin E. Marty (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1984), 542.

49.    In “The Grammar of Grace: Karl Rahner as a Watershed in Contemporary Theology,” Theological Studies 49 (1988), 445.

50.    Paul D. Molnar, “Can We Know God Directly? Rahner’s Solution From Experience,” Theological Studies 46 (1985), 228, 232. Molnar’s criticism comes to mind when reading such statements as these in Rahner (Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych [New York: Crossroad, 1990], 63 and 215): “God to be sure is different from the world. But... it is precisely the difference which establishes the ultimate unity between God and the world, and the difference becomes intelligible only in this unity”; and “God makes the world his own in such a way that this world is not only his work, a work distinct from himself, but it also becomes his own reality.” Such statements are strongly reminiscent of Hegel.

51.    Martin, The Jesuits, 22.

52.    See note 28. Twenty volumes have been published to date.

53.    Mark Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology 1800-1970, trans. N. D. Smith (Para-mus, N.J.: Paulist Newman, 1970), 126, 129. Schoof notes Rahner’s “laconic remark during an interview: ‘Some days I write nothing’ ”!

54.    Remember Raymond E. Brown’s reference to the Roman Catholic “center.”

55.    Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church, 20.

56.    Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism (Minneapolis: Winston, 1981), 1173.

57.    Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church, 3.

58.    Anne Carr, “Starting with the Human,” in A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology, ed. Leo J. O’Donovan (New York: Seabury, 1980), 18 n. 35.

59.    William V. Dych, “Theology in a New Key,” in ibid., 3.

60.    Mueller, What Are They Saying About Theological Method? 6.

61.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 33.

62.    McBrien, Catholicism, 129.

63.    Dych, “Glossary,” in A World of Grace, 191.

64.    McBrien, Catholicism, 160.

65.    Dych, “Theology in a New Key,” 69, 14.

66.    Karl Rahner, Later Writings, trans. Karl-H. Kruger, vol. 5 of Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1966), 186-87. These closing “remarks” are not included in the republished form of this essay in Foundations of Christian Faith.

67.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 228.

68.    Anne Carr, in A Handbook of Christian Theologians, 535.

69.    Dulles, The Catholicity of the Church, 63.

70.    Karl Rahner and Wilhelm Thousing, A New Christology, trans. David Smith and Verdant Green (New York: Seabuiy, 1980), 26.

71.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 191.

72.    Bruce Marshall, Christology in Conflict: The Identity of a Saviour in Rahner and Barth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), viii.

73.    Marshall, Christology in Conflict, 7.

74.    Ibid., 29.

75.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 178.

76.    Ibid., 181.

77.    Rahner, Theological Investigations, 5:424.

78.    Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “The Biblical Commission and Christology,” Theological Studies 46 (1985): 424.

79.    John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, vol. XX of The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967). The citations that follow appear on pages 467,469,470,471.

80.    The thesis of Gregory Baum’s early book, Man Becoming: God in Secular Experience (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970), is recognized if you simply omit the colon in the title.

81.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 195,284.

82.    Bruce McDermott, “Roman Catholic Christology,” Theological Studies 41 (1980): 345-46.

83.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 198, 200, 201, 202.

84.    Dych, “Theology in a New Key,” 12.

85.    J. Peter Schineller, in A World of Grace, 100.

86.    Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 245.

87.    Ibid., 266, 267, 267-68, 275.

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