Karl Rahner in Context

Karl Rahner's theology is essentially spiritual and pastoral. His theology arose from his experience as a Jesuit, living at the heart of the traumas of twentieth-century Europe and, at the same time, interpreting the new academic insights in Church history and the early Fathers, scholasticism and modern philosophy, within the framework of the Church's traditional teaching.     

The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner

Books reviewed:
Declan Marmion and Mary E. Hines, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner. Reviewed by Cyrus P. Olsen Regent's Park College Oxford     

Mysterium Christi: the Christologies of Maurice de la Taille and Karl Rahner

Abstract: This article argues that Maurice de la Taille's theology of created actuation by uncreated Act constructively develops Karl Rahner's Christology. The first part gives an account of de la Taille's theology of created actuation by uncreated Act through an examination of the three supernatural communications of the hypostatic union, beatific vision and sanctifying grace. The second part dialogically integrates the insights of de la Taille's theology with Rahner's Christology. The article demonstrates that de la Taille's theology could develop Rahner's Christology. This conclusion raises the question of the value of scholasticism as a method of theology.     

Augustine and Karl Rahner on the Relationship between the Immanent Trinity and the Economic Trinity

Abstract:  Karl Rahner developed his influential axiom concerning the identity of the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity largely as a polemical reaction to their separation in the Western tradition, a tradition heavily shaped by Augustine. An analysis of Augustine's De Trinitate , however, reveals that Augustine was not guilty of most of the charges of which Rahner accuses him. Furthermore, Rahner's outworking of his fundamental axiom leads him into numerous difficulties that he could have avoided had he adhered to Augustine's view of a close but differentiated relationship between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity.     

Religious Diversity, Christian Doctrine and Karl Barth

Abstract:   The recognition of the heterogeneity of the goals of the world's religions has led to a greater alertness to the doctrinal questions raised by the presence of truth and rectitude which Christians might recognize in the other religions. In this article J.A. DiNoia's proposals for the recognition of subordinate and non-oppositional truths in the other religions, and his more recent defence of Barth's account of the religions in Church Dogmatics §17, are brought into dialogue with Karl Barth's account of truth extra muros ecclesiae in CD §69. It is argued that the latter raises a number of crucial doctrinal questions for DiNoia's own proposal for the recognition of subordinate and non-oppositional truth, and that it is a more important resource for contemporary discussions than is the controversial CD §17.     

Metaphor,Religious Language,and Religious Experience

Is it possible to talk about God without either misrepresentation or failing to assert anything of significance? The article begins by reviewing how, in attempting to answer this question, traditional theories of religious language have failed to sidestep both potential pitfalls adequately. After arguing that recently developed theories of metaphor seem better able to shed light on the nature of religious language, it considers the claim that huge areas of our language and, consequently, of our experience are shaped by metaphors. Finally, it considers some of the more significant implications of this claim for our understanding of both religious language and religious experience.     

The Grammar of Pneumatology in Barth and Rahner: A Reconsideration

The trinitarian theologies of Barth and Rahner have tended to be read as failing to overcome a pneumatological deficiency that characterizes Western theology, despite the importance of their thought to proponents of the contemporary trinitarian 'revival'. This article argues, however, that in fact their conceptualizations of the doctrine of the Trinity depend upon essential pneumatological themes: Barth's understanding of the Spirit as the subjective reality of revelation's effect, and Rahner's proposals concerning the gift of the Spirit in terms of uncreated grace and quasi-formal causality. These insights have been largely overlooked or misconstrued, not least because both Barth and Rahner deploy their pneumatologies in the course of polemical debates with their nineteenth-century predecessors. A fresh reading of these theologians yields a pneumatology that I characterize as a grammar of the construction of graced subjectivity.