Justified True Belief

(●) The Jesuit who taught that God has already drawn close to every person alive, and whose thinking runs all through the Second Vatican Council. + In the summer of 1962 a Jesuit professor at Innsbruck was told through his superiors that from then on nothing he wrote could be printed until Rome had approved it first. No warning came with the notice and no reasons were given. Before the year was out the same man was in Rome as a theological expert to the Second Vatican Council, and within a year he was helping to draft the document that would open with the words Lumen gentium, the light of the nations. That reversal is the shortest way into Karl Rahner, who spent his life inside a church that could not decide whether he was its most dangerous thinker or its most useful one. He is here because he asked a question that belongs to everybody and not only to professors. What happens to the person who never hears? The farmer in a village the gospel never reached, the child who dies before anyone can tell her anything, the honest unbeliever who does the next right thing for sixty years without a creed: Rahner refused to file any of them away, and he built a whole theology out of taking them seriously. Along the way he left behind three pieces of vocabulary that any reader of modern theology will run into sooner or later: the supernatural existential, the anonymous Christian, and the rule about the Trinity that still carries his name. Some of what he built is deeply contested, and the contesting is done by serious Christians on both sides. It is worth knowing what he actually said before joining in. One number gives the scale of the man. His bibliography runs to more than four thousand published items. The critical edition of his works, the Sämtliche Werke, took Herder twenty-three years and thirty-two volumes to finish.

(●) 1904 AD: Born in Freiburg, the fourth of seven children, he followed his older brother into the Jesuits at eighteen. + Karl Rahner was born on 5 March 1904 in Freiburg im Breisgau, in the south-west corner of Germany. His father, also Karl, taught at a teacher-training college; his mother was Luise Trescher; and there were seven children in the house, of whom Karl was the fourth. It was an ordinary Catholic middle-class family of its time and place, and nothing about it suggested that two of the sons would end up shaping the study of Christian theology in two different centuries of the church. The other one was Hugo, four years older, who had entered the Society of Jesus, the order everyone calls the Jesuits, in 1919 and went on to become a distinguished scholar of the church fathers at Innsbruck. Karl followed him in 1922, at eighteen, into the novitiate of the North German Province at Feldkirch in Austria, the two years of probation, prayer and plain work with which Jesuit life begins. A story long told about the two of them, which nobody has managed to trace to anything Hugo actually wrote, has him saying that when he retired he would spend the time translating his brother’s books into German. Jesuit formation in those years was long and slow by design, and Rahner went the whole distance of it. Philosophy came first, at Feldkirch and then at Pullach near Munich from 1924 to 1927, where the set texts were the scholastics, the medieval masters of the Catholic schools, Thomas Aquinas chief among them. Alongside those he read Kant, who had argued that a mind never takes in the world raw but always shapes what arrives, so that whatever lies past the reach of experience is closed to us. That is an awkward thing to have said in a house whose main subject is God, and the man who showed Rahner a way through it was the Belgian Jesuit Joseph Maréchal. Maréchal took Kant’s problem seriously and then answered it from inside Thomas Aquinas: if the mind is always straining past the particular thing in front of it, the straining has a direction, and what it is straining toward is God. That answer would mark everything Rahner later wrote. Then came two years of teaching Latin to novices, and after that, theology.

(●) 1932 AD: He was ordained a priest at twenty-eight, having studied theology in the Dutch exile house the German Jesuits built when Germany shut the order out. + From 1929 he studied theology at Valkenburg in the Netherlands. The house was there for a reason that tells you something about the century he was born into. Bismarck’s Jesuit Law of 1872 shut the order out of Germany, the province sent its students to England for a while, and then in the 1890s it built the Ignatiuskolleg at Valkenburg, a few miles over the Dutch border, and kept its school of theology there until 1940. Rahner did his whole theological training as a German in a house that existed because Germany had thrown the order out. He was ordained on 26 July 1932. After ordination came tertianship, the final year of Jesuit formation, spent at St Andrä in the Lavanttal valley of Austria. His superiors then decided what he would be: they sent him back to Freiburg to take a doctorate in philosophy, because the province needed someone to teach the history of philosophy. It is worth pausing on that, because it is the sort of thing a career is actually made of. One of the most influential Catholic theologians of the twentieth century was assigned to philosophy by a personnel decision, and the assignment was about to go wrong.

(●) 1936 AD: Freiburg refused his philosophy thesis, so Innsbruck gave him a doctorate in theology instead, and the rejected thesis became a famous book. + He was at Freiburg from 1934 to 1936, and while he was there he went to more or less everything Martin Heidegger taught, four semesters of lectures and seminars, keeping the list of the courses for the rest of his life. Heidegger was then at the height of his fame and about the most demanding teacher in Europe, and Rahner said years afterwards that although he had sat under many good professors in the classroom, there was only one he could revere as his teacher, and that was Heidegger. His doctoral director was a different man entirely. Martin Honecker held the chair of Christian philosophy, and what he wanted from a Catholic doctoral student was an account of Thomas Aquinas that looked like the accounts already in the textbooks. What Rahner handed him was a close reading of a few pages of Aquinas on how the mind comes to know a physical thing, argued with Maréchal in one hand and Heidegger in the other, and Honecker turned it down for straying from the neo-scholastic line, which is to say the standard modern reading of Aquinas that Catholic faculties were then expected to keep inside. Rahner published it anyway, in 1939, as Geist in Welt, Spirit in the World. It is now one of the most discussed philosophical books a Catholic wrote in that century, and it is still in print in English. So he went to Innsbruck instead and took a doctorate in theology, awarded on 19 December 1936, for a study of the church being born from the wounded side of Christ on the cross. His habilitation, the second German degree that qualifies a man to lecture, followed on 1 July 1937, and he began teaching dogmatic theology at Innsbruck that autumn, dogmatic theology being the part of the subject that works out what the church actually believes and on what grounds. He was thirty-three, and he had two years.

(●) 1939 AD: The Nazis closed his faculty, and he spent the war in a Vienna pastoral office and then a village parish in Bavaria. + Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. The Jesuit college at Innsbruck was taken over, and in October 1939 the Jesuits were expelled from the Tyrol and the theology faculty was shut down. Rahner was thirty-five, two years into the teaching career he had been trained for, and it stopped. He went to Vienna and spent five years at the diocesan Pastoral Institute, forbidden to lecture in public, working instead on the practical question of how an ordinary parish keeps going when the state is hostile: catechesis, which is the plain teaching of the faith to children and to newcomers, preaching, and what to do about the sacraments under restriction. In 1944, with Vienna being bombed, he was sent to do parish work at Mariakirchen in Lower Bavaria, and he finished the war as a village priest. From 1945 to 1948 he taught at Pullach, and in 1948 he was finally able to go back to Innsbruck, where he held a chair in dogmatic theology until 1964. Something should be said about what he had written in the middle of all this. Worte ins Schweigen, Words into Silence, published in 1938 and known in English as Encounters with Silence, is a set of ten prayers addressed to God by a man who talks to him as one talks to somebody who will not answer back in words. It is short, it is not technical, and it has stayed in print for nearly ninety years. Readers who find his theology hard going are often sent to it first, and they are sent there rightly: the prayers and the theology are about the same thing.

(●) 1962 AD: Rome put everything he wrote under prior censorship, and within months a cardinal took him to the Council anyway. + On 1 June 1962 Rahner gave an address at the Austrian Catholic Day in Salzburg called "Do Not Stifle the Spirit," taking the title from Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians not to quench the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19). His point was that a church can become so defensive that it stops listening for anything new, and that the temptation runs right up through those who hold office in it. Almost at once he was informed, through his Jesuit superiors, that everything he wrote from then on had to go to Rome for approval before publication. No reasons came with it. The objections, as far as anyone could tell, concerned things he had written about the Eucharist and about Mary. He was not alone in this, and the company he was in says something about the decade. Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, a Jesuit and two Dominicans whose historical work had reopened questions Rome would rather have left settled, had all been treated much the same way in those years, and all of them ended the decade vindicated. Three German-speaking cardinals, Julius Döpfner, Franz König and Josef Frings, went to the pope on Rahner’s behalf, and a group of lay academics got up a petition and sent that too. König told the story himself, forty years later, in The Tablet. When he learned that bishops could bring their own theologians to the Council, "I immediately rang the Jesuit Karl Rahner, whom I knew well, and asked him to accompany me to Rome. I knew that Rahner was convinced that it was our mission to go out into the world and proclaim the Gospel message, and not to keep the faith locked away behind closed doors. But Rahner was aghast." Rahner’s first answer was that Rome already had misgivings enough about him, and that turning up as a council theologian would only make it worse. Then he changed his mind: "All right, in God’s name, but you must take the responsibility! Who knows what will happen when Ottaviani sees me!" Alfredo Ottaviani ran the Holy Office, the department that had censored him. Rahner travelled to Rome with König when the Council opened that October, John XXIII named him a peritus, an official expert to the Council, before the year was out, and the censorship quietly lapsed.

(●) 1964 AD: He took Romano Guardini’s chair in Munich, moved on to Münster, and wrote without stopping for another twenty years. + In 1964 he left Innsbruck for the University of Munich to succeed Romano Guardini in the chair of Christianity and the Philosophy of Religion. Guardini had been one of the great Catholic voices of the previous generation, and the chair was a public appointment in the fullest sense. Three years later Rahner moved again, to a chair of dogmatic theology at Münster, which he held until he retired in 1971. He then went back to Munich, and in 1981, at seventy-seven, back to Innsbruck. Retirement changed nothing about the output. The sixteen volumes of Schriften zur Theologie, the collected essays that are really his life’s work, came out one at a time from 1954 until the year he died, which is thirty years of essays landing at the rate of a volume every other year. On top of those he co-edited the fourteen volumes of the second Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, the standard German Catholic reference work, and then Sacramentum Mundi, four volumes in German and six in English, and he founded a monograph series and kept running it. And at seventy-two, out of lecture courses given at Munich and Münster, he finally wrote the one book that tries to put the whole thing together in order: Grundkurs des Glaubens, which English readers know as Foundations of Christian Faith. He was not, by his own account, a systematic theologian, and he never pretended the essays added up to a system. He wrote when somebody asked him a question, which is why the bibliography is enormous and why so much of it is occasional. A great deal of it was answering letters.

(●) 1984 AD: He turned eighty, dictated a defence of a theologian under investigation, and died twenty-five days later. + His eightieth birthday fell on 5 March 1984 and was marked with celebrations in Freiburg and Innsbruck. He was already ill. Eleven days later, on 16 March, he dictated a letter to Cardinal Juan Landázuri Ricketts, the archbishop of Lima. The Peruvian bishops had been asked from Rome to examine the writings of Gustavo Gutiérrez, the Lima priest who had given liberation theology its name, meaning the attempt to read the gospel from where the poor of Latin America were standing, and the bishops were divided. Rahner wrote that he was convinced of the orthodoxy of Gutiérrez’s theological work, and that the theology of liberation that he represented was entirely orthodox. He had no particular stake in Peru and was not a liberation theologian himself. He had been censored once, without reasons, and he knew exactly what it was like on the receiving end. He died at Innsbruck on 30 March 1984, twenty-five days after his eightieth birthday, and is buried in the crypt of the Jesuit church there, near his brother Hugo, who had died in 1968. The letter to Lima was the last thing he wrote that anyone else read.

What He Taught

(T1) God is not one item in the world alongside others, but the mystery every mind is already reaching toward. + Try to name everything in a room. Chair, window, radiator, the noise of traffic outside. You could keep going for a long time, and at no point in the list would you come to God, which is the beginning of a real difficulty. If God were an item on that kind of list, he would be one more thing among things, bigger than the others but the same sort of item, and that is not what Christians have ever meant by the word. Rahner’s way in was to look not at the list but at the listing. Every time you know a particular thing, you know it as one thing and not everything; you know it has edges; and to know that something has edges you must somehow already be reaching past them. He called that reaching transcendence, which in his vocabulary does not mean a mystical experience but the ordinary structure of any act of knowing at all. Ask a question, any question, and you have already admitted that there is more than you have got. The same is true of choosing. Every particular thing you want, you want against a background of wanting more than it. That endless background is what he means by mystery, and it is his first word for God. Not mystery in the sense of a puzzle that would dissolve if somebody explained it properly, but mystery in the sense of the horizon: the thing you never arrive at because it is what lets you see everything else. Which has an odd and rather bracing consequence. We usually think of the clear things as certain and the mysterious ones as doubtful. Rahner turns that around. The clear things are clear because they stand out against something we cannot see the edges of, and so mystery is not the last and shakiest item of knowledge but the first and steadiest one. Christian readers will hear something familiar and something to argue about. The familiar part is the whole apophatic tradition, the ancient Christian habit of saying what God is not because no word we have is big enough: Gregory of Nyssa had it, and so did Augustine. What has to be watched is whether a God described mainly as horizon can still be the God who speaks, names, commands and forgives. Rahner would say the horizon is exactly what makes it possible for a word to arrive and be recognized as God’s. Whether that works is a fair question, and it is the argument his critics start with.

(Q) "All clear understanding is grounded in the darkness of God." + Source: Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 22 (William V. Dych translation). He has just argued that transcendence is not a luxury of the intellectual life but the condition of any understanding whatever, and the sentence is the conclusion he draws (T1). The darkness is not ignorance. It is what light is seen against.

(T2) God offers himself to every person, always, before anyone has thought to ask. + Here is the picture Rahner was arguing against. Human beings have a nature, complete in itself, which goes about its business; and then, quite separately, grace arrives from outside, like a letter delivered to a house that was perfectly weatherproof without it. On that picture grace is an addition, and a person who never receives the letter has lost nothing that belonged to him. Rahner thought that picture was false to the gospel, and he answered it with a phrase he made and then had to keep explaining: the supernatural existential. Take it in two halves. An existential, a word he borrowed from Heidegger, is a permanent feature of what it is to be a human being, something true of you whether you notice it or not, the way being mortal is true of you on a Tuesday afternoon when you are thinking about lunch. Supernatural means it is not owed to us and does not come from our nature; it is God’s free gift. Put together, the supernatural existential is Rahner’s name for this claim: God’s offer of himself is not an occasional delivery to selected addresses. It has already been made, to everyone, and it has left a permanent mark on what a human being actually is. Two things about this are easy to get wrong, and he was careful about both. First, the offer is not the acceptance. The supernatural existential is not saving grace already given and safely in the bank; it is the offer standing open, which a person can take or refuse, and the refusing is real. Second, it is not something we are owed. Grace that human nature could demand would not be grace. What it does explain is the thing every pastor has noticed and no tidy scheme accounts for: that people who have no faith and make no claim to any are sometimes visibly good, patient under things that would break anyone, generous with no audience watching. Rahner would not call that an accident of temperament. He would say it happens in a world where God has already come close, and that the person doing it is answering something, even if he has no name for it.

(Q) "On the one hand this salvation is specifically Christian, for there is no salvation apart from Christ, while, on the other, God truly and seriously wants all men to be saved. Both can be combined only by saying that man is exposed to the influence of divine grace, which offers him communion with God, whether he accepts it or not." + Source: Karl Rahner, Grace in Freedom, "Is Christianity an ‘Absolute Religion’?" (Hilda Graef translation). Two convictions he will not give up, and then the move he makes to hold them together (T2). Notice what the last clause protects: the grace is offered, and the offering does not settle what a person will do with it. Scripture is on the generous side of the question: God "desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4).

(T3) A person who has never heard of Christ may still be saved by Christ, and Rahner called such a person an anonymous Christian. + This is the thing he is most famous for, the thing he is most attacked for, and the thing most often reported inaccurately, so it is worth laying out slowly. He starts from two convictions he will not let go of, both of them scriptural. The first is that God wants everyone saved (1 Timothy 2:4). The second is that there is no salvation apart from Christ: "there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). Now hold both at once and look at the actual history of the human race, in which the overwhelming majority of people who have ever lived died without hearing the name. Either God’s desire fails on a colossal scale, or there is some way for the grace of Christ to reach a person who has never heard of him. Rahner took the second road, and the term he coined for the traveller on it was anonymous Christian: someone who has accepted God’s offer of himself, in the only form it reached him, without ever learning the name that belongs to it. Anonymous, as a letter is anonymous: the thing is real, the signature is missing. Three qualifications, all his, all usually left out. He never said that other religions save, and he never said that all roads lead to the same place; his claim was about Christ’s grace reaching people, not about religious systems being interchangeable. He never said the label was for use in conversation. He said plainly that it was a piece of Christian theology, meant to help Christians think about people outside the church, and that no Buddhist should be expected to find it flattering. And he insisted, in the same breath in which he proposed it, that preaching is not thereby made pointless. He put it flatly in Grace in Freedom: "Hence we may on no account conclude that the preaching of Christianity is superfluous, because a man is an anonymous Christian without it." The gospel, on his account, does not create a Christian out of somebody God had abandoned; it brings into the light, and into the confessing company of the church, what was hidden and unnamed. That is a promotion, not a formality, and he thought a person had a better chance with it than without it. None of which settles the question. It is possible to grant every qualification and still think the whole construction goes further than Scripture allows, and a great many Christians do.

(Q) "A Buddhist monk (or anyone else I might suppose) who, because he follows his conscience, attains salvation and lives in the grace of God; of him I must say that he is an anonymous Christian; if not, I would have to presuppose that there is a genuine path to salvation that really attains that goal, but that simply has nothing to do with Jesus Christ. But I cannot do that." + Source: Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews 1965-1982, p. 207. An interviewer had asked him to say what the phrase actually meant, and this is the answer, given late in his life and in ordinary speech. Note the shape of it. It is not a claim that the monk’s religion saves him. It is a refusal to say that anyone gets to God around Christ (T3), and the term is what is left once that refusal is held together with the fact that grace reaches people the preacher never did.

(T4) The God who meets us in Christ and in the Spirit is God as he actually is, and not a face he puts on for our benefit. + Rahner opened his book on the Trinity with an observation that has been quoted against comfortable Christians ever since. Suppose the doctrine of the Trinity were struck out tomorrow as false. How much of the average Christian’s prayer, preaching and devotional reading would actually have to change? Very little, he thought, and that is the scandal: the church confesses three persons and lives, most of the time, as though God were simply one. He traced the trouble to a habit of treating the Trinity as a separate department. Theologians would first discuss the one God and his attributes, and only afterwards, in a different section, the three persons, as though the second topic added detail to the first without affecting it. Do that long enough and the Trinity turns into a piece of information about God’s private life, true but inert, with no connection to anything that happens to us. His repair is the sentence now known as Rahner’s Rule, and it needs its two terms taught before it makes sense. The economic Trinity means God as he shows up in the history of salvation: the Father who sends, the Son who is born, dies and rises, the Spirit poured out at Pentecost. The word has nothing to do with money; it comes from the Greek oikonomia, the running of a household, and it means God’s arrangement of the world’s rescue. The immanent Trinity means God as he is in himself, eternally, before and apart from any world at all. The rule says these are not two subjects. What God shows us in the sending of the Son and the giving of the Spirit is what God is. The gain is enormous and quite easy to state. If the rule holds, then when you are dealing with Jesus you are dealing with God himself and not with a representative, and when the Spirit is at work in you it is God himself and not a delegated influence. The gift is the Giver. The worry, pressed hard by later critics, runs the other way: if God in himself just is God in history, does God end up needing the world in order to be what he is? Rahner did not think so, and he kept saying that God’s freedom in creating is not up for negotiation. Others have thought his formula makes that harder to say than it should be.

(Q) "The ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity and the ‘immanent’ Trinity is the ‘economic’ Trinity." + Source: Karl Rahner, The Trinity, p. 22 (Joseph Donceel translation). A dozen pages earlier in the same book, at pages 10 and 11, comes the complaint that set it up: Christians, he wrote, "are, in their practical life, almost mere ‘monotheists’," and if the doctrine of the Trinity were dropped as false, most religious literature could stay as it is (T4). The rule is his answer to that, and it is the sentence of his that later theologians have quoted most.

(T5) The believer of the future will have experienced God for himself, or will not be a believer at all. + Rahner could see what was coming. Faith carried by a whole culture, absorbed at school and in the street and never separately decided on, was going to stop being available, and Christians who had only ever had that were going to find they had nothing. What would be left was whatever a person had actually met. That is what he means by calling the Christian of the future a mystic, and the word needs disarming at once. He is not talking about visions, levitation or the extraordinary gifts of the great Spanish contemplatives, and he explicitly refused to let mysticism mean an elite hobby for religious specialists. He meant something he called the mysticism of everyday life, and the way he taught it was not by definition but by a long list of instances, which is the most concrete writing he ever did. There is the person who forgives, gets no thanks for it, and does not even get the satisfaction of feeling noble. There is the one who keeps quiet when he could defend himself and is being treated unjustly, and who does not enjoy his own silence. There is the one who does his duty knowing that nobody will ever thank him and that it looks ridiculous. There is the one who tries to love God when no answering warmth comes back at all, so that the loving feels like calling into empty space. None of those, he says, is a religious experience in the sense of a feeling. Each is a place where a person has let go of what he could hold and hoped anyway, and Rahner’s claim is that this is the Holy Spirit, met in the middle of an ordinary week and usually not recognized. There is a pastoral judgement buried in this and it deserves saying out loud. Rahner did not think most people lack experience of God. He thought most people have it constantly and have never been given the words to identify it, and he thought the job of preaching and teaching was less to import something foreign than to point at what is there and name it. He had a word for that too, mystagogy, meaning to lead someone into a mystery he is already standing in.

(Q) "The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’, one who has ‘experienced’ something, or he will cease to be anything at all." + Source: Karl Rahner, "Christian Living Formerly and Today," in Theological Investigations, vol. 7, p. 15 (David Bourke translation). Written in the 1960s about a Europe whose inherited Christianity was visibly draining away (T5). The quotation marks around "mystic" and "experienced" are his own, and they are a warning: he is stretching both words, and he knows it.

(Q) "The actual concrete activity of the Church in its relation to the world outside of Europe was in fact (if you will pardon the expression) the activity of an export firm which exported a European religion as a commodity it did not really want to change but sent throughout the world together with the rest of the culture and civilization it considered superior." + Source: Karl Rahner, "Towards a Fundamental Theological Interpretation of Vatican II," Theological Studies 40 (1979), p. 717 (Leo J. O’Donovan translation). An address given at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 April 1979, when he was seventy-five. He is arguing that the Second Vatican Council was the moment the church first acted, officially and clumsily, as a church of the whole world rather than of one civilization, and the sentence is his blunt description of what it had been doing before.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) The Council took up his account of the church, down to the two words its central document is named after, Lumen gentium. + The bishops arrived in Rome in October 1962 to find draft documents waiting for them, prepared in advance by Roman commissions. Rahner had read them for Cardinal König and had not been impressed. Scripture, he complained, was not being used as the foundation of the argument but quarried afterwards for proof texts; the older tradition was barely consulted, while recent encyclicals, the teaching letters a pope sends out to the whole church, were quoted constantly; and questions that were genuinely open among Catholic theologians were about to be settled by definition. The Council fathers rejected the draft on the church, and the German-speaking bishops decided to write a new one. Between December 1962 and February 1963 four drafts of what scholars now call the German Schema were produced. Rahner worked on the first of them with Otto Semmelroth, Alois Grillmeier and Hermann Volk, the bishop of Mainz; later drafts drew in Cardinal Döpfner, Joseph Ratzinger, Rudolf Schnackenburg and Michael Schmaus, and then Belgian, French and Dutch voices including Gérard Philips, Yves Congar and Edward Schillebeeckx. That is a great many names for four drafts, and the length of the list is the thing to carry away from it: the new account of the church was not one man’s idea pushed through a committee, it was a committee’s work from the first page, and the committee kept growing. Its governing idea was the church as the sacrament of salvation for the whole world: not primarily an institution with a legal structure, but a visible sign through which an invisible grace is given, and given for everyone rather than only for the people inside it. In the end it was Philips’s text that carried the day, but he had taken a great deal from the German draft, including the sacramental description of the church and its opening two words. Lumen gentium, the light of the nations, is the title the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church has been known by ever since, and the first article says that the church is in Christ like a sacrament, a sign and instrument of communion with God and of the unity of the whole human race. A dogmatic constitution is the most solemn grade of document a council issues, so what that first article is doing is not offering counsel about the church but saying what the church is. Rahner was among the small group of theologians who had a hand in drafting that constitution, and his work is also visible in the Council’s treatment of the college of bishops and in its restoration of the permanent diaconate. One paragraph of it bears directly on what he had spent twenty years arguing. Article 16 teaches that "those also can attain to salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience." The Council did not adopt his terminology and never used the phrase anonymous Christian. What it did was leave standing, at the level of a dogmatic constitution, precisely the question his theory had been built to answer.

(†) His rule about the Trinity travelled far outside his own communion, and Protestant theologians took it up as readily as Catholics did. + The reception of Rahner’s Rule (T4) is one of the odder episodes in modern theology, because a Jesuit’s sentence became the common property of people who agree with him about almost nothing else. Jürgen Moltmann, a Reformed theologian writing out of the German Protestant tradition, built on it. So did Wolfhart Pannenberg, a Lutheran, who engaged it closely, and Catherine Mowry LaCugna, an American Catholic, who made it the hinge of a whole book, while the Scottish Reformed theologian Thomas F. Torrance worked over the same ground from a different direction. Set those four beside each other and the oddity is plain: a German Reformed theologian, a Lutheran, an American Catholic and a Scottish Presbyterian, none of whom would sign one another’s confessions, all building on one sentence of a Jesuit’s. Within a couple of decades one could write, with only mild exaggeration, that the axiom was accepted by practically every contemporary theologian, and a good deal of the renewal of trinitarian theology in the late twentieth century traces back to a short book Rahner originally wrote as a contribution to somebody else’s handbook. The traffic went the other way too. Rahner spent his last years working on reunion. In 1983, with the Munich theologian Heinrich Fries, he published Einigung der Kirchen: reale Möglichkeit, translated as Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility. Its proposal was startlingly concrete: eight theses which, if the churches would accept them, could bring about reunion in years rather than centuries. Agreement on the fundamental truths of Scripture and the ancient creeds would be required of everybody; beyond that, no church would be obliged to reject as false anything its partners taught, and the churches would recognize each other’s ministries. The two authors were frank that this meant postponing some real scruples, and they argued that the obligation laid on Christians by Jesus to be one was urgent enough to justify it. The reception was mixed and often sharp. Cardinal Ratzinger, who had worked alongside Rahner on the German Schema twenty years earlier, objected that the scheme bought unity at the cost of truth, by asking the churches to live with contradictions rather than resolve them. That criticism has stuck, and the Fries-Rahner theses have never been adopted. They are still argued over in ecumenical work, which for a book by two men in their seventies is not nothing.

(†) Two things he taught draw the serious criticism: the anonymous Christian, and a method that begins with the human subject. + Two objections attach to what Rahner himself taught, and both were pressed hardest by people who knew his work well. They are not the same objection, and it is worth keeping them apart. - The anonymous Christian and the missionary. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian who had been a Jesuit himself, published Cordula oder der Ernstfall in 1966, translated as The Moment of Christian Witness. His test case is a short satirical dialogue late in the book: a Christian in front of a well-disposed commissar who can have him shot. What, on Rahner’s account, is he dying for? If grace has already reached everyone in the room and the difference between the believer and the unbeliever is whether one of them has the name for what he already has, then martyrdom looks like a preference strongly held, and Balthasar thought a theology that produced that result had lost the cross somewhere. • The scriptural form of the same worry is shorter. Paul asks how anyone is to call on a God he has not believed in, and how he is to believe in one he has never heard of, "And how are they to hear without someone preaching?" (Romans 10:14), concluding that faith comes from hearing (Romans 10:17). On that reading, preaching is not the naming of a thing already possessed but the arrival of news, and a person’s response to it is the difference between life and death. • Rahner’s answer was given in advance and should be weighed. He denied that preaching becomes superfluous, held that explicit faith is a genuinely higher and safer thing than the anonymous kind, and took the missionary command as binding. Whether that answer is strong enough to carry the weight is the live question, and it is disputed among Catholics as much as between Catholics and Protestants. - Beginning with the human subject. Rahner’s method is called transcendental theology: it starts by examining what must be true of a human being for revelation to be receivable at all, and only then turns to what God has actually said and done. Balthasar’s charge was that the starting point is too much our own, that a God approached as the horizon of human questioning can end up sounding like the answer our questions were shaped to want, and that the crucified Christ arrives late in such a system and fits it awkwardly. Reformed and evangelical critics, coming from a quite different direction, have said something similar about where the authority sits: if the experience of grace is universal and the preached word interprets it, the word is explaining our experience rather than judging it. • Rahner himself never claimed that the human subject generates the content of revelation, and he insisted that the transcendental analysis only clears ground for a word that has to be spoken from outside. He also, more than once, said he was not building a system. His defenders point out that the objection often lands on the popularized Rahner rather than the printed one. Neither criticism reduces to a complaint about his Catholicism. The disagreements a Protestant has with him about the church, the sacraments or Mary are the ordinary disagreements of the Reformation, and he neither invented them nor sharpened them. What these two objections dispute is what he added.