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God Christ and Salvation: Barth and Rahner
Session 4: Rahner on Divine Action, Created Causes and Incarnation
a) MARY IN THEOLOGY
There is really a human theology, a proclamation of the faith and a theology that
praise and glorify God by their saying something about humanity. Why is this?
Firstly, God really is all in all. There is nothing alongside God that would of itself be
worthy of mention when the faith is proclaimed and theology being done. In a real sense, one
cannot in this holy house of God say anything, praise or mention anything except the eternal
God, and God alone. Before God, everything else sinks into the abyss of its absolute
insignificance. In theology and in faith it is not that there is God and then anything else you
might think of; there is only the one God, past all grasp, thrice holy, worthy of adoration.
When the heart reflects, makes confession, and raises itself to God, everything else must fall
silent, everything else must be passed over in silence. Then the human person can do no more
than what we call the adoration, the blessing of this God. For after all, the life of faith and the
effort of theology are meant to be growing into that one life whose entire content is the loving
gaze on God face to face, the eternal praise of the grace which is God’s alone.
And nevertheless, there is a theology of humanity, a Creed that says something about
humanity itself, and this not alongside profession of faith in the sole eternal God, but right
within this profession itself. Why is this so? Because God, God’s own self, God in God’s
tripersonal life, God in God’s ineffable glory, God in God’s eternal life, has taken us into this
eternal life that is God’s own. There is no need, as a poet of our day has said, for us to be
dead so that God can be alive. God has not just given us something, something that God has
created out of nothing; God has, beyond all that, given us God’s own self. God has called us
out of nothingness so that we can truly be; God has given us freedom, so that we can really
and truly be God’s partners in God’s presence. God has established a covenant with us. God’s
will was not just to deal with us through the creation, with what we encounter remaining just
the finite, and bearing within itself a sign or a mere pointer towards a God always still
remaining beyond. God’s will has been to deal with us as God’s self, with what happens and
what God does, what God shows and what God gives, ultimately nevertheless being really
God’s self—even if now only in the promise that God will one day show Godself to us from
face to face, with nothing remaining between God and us. Thus—this is the mystery of faith
that is most worthy of adoration—God’s own self in God’s own Word has become human.
And if this is true, if it is part of the mystery of our God that this God is not just the
God of the philosophers but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and indeed, what is more,
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, then for us Christians there is no profession of faith in the
eternal God apart from our praising God as the one who has given His own self to us—and so
much so that we can truly profess faith regarding one who is human that “he sits at the right
hand of the eternal God,”—so much so, that we really and truly cannot do theology any more
without also talking about humanity, doing anthropology—so much so, that we can no longer
say who God is in the truth and reality of the actual life God lives, without saying that God’s
eternal word, in which God expresses God’s very self, is humanity for all eternity.
Mary, Mother of the Lord, 24-28
b) Rahner on God and ‘Divine Intervention’
Something finite as such, insofar as it appears as a definite, individual thing within our
transcendental horizon, cannot represent God in such a way that, by the very fact that it is
given, the very self of God is also present in a way which goes beyond the possibility of
mediation in our transcendental experience. Prescinding from the fact that transcendental
experience and its orientation to God can be mediated by every categorical existent, we must
insist that a definite, individual thing within our transcendental horizon cannot mediate God
in such a way that … this presence of God over and beyond his transcendentality could have
the kind of character which we seem to presuppose in a popular interpretation of religious
phenomena. This is precluded simply by the absolute difference which necessarily obtains
between the holy mystery as the ground, and everything which is grounded. … But it is
admittedly still not clear why and to what extent this kind of mediation should belong to one
particular categorical existent rather than to another. And not until we can explain this can
there be something like a concrete religion which is practiced in the concrete with its
categorical religious realities.
(there can be a ‘natural religion’, a ‘devotion’ to the things of this world—but this is keeping
out any claim that we meet God in particular places. But …)
Is there the possibility of an immediacy to God in which, without him ceasing to be really
himself by being made a categorical object, he no longer appears merely as the ever-distant
condition of possibility for a subject's activity in the world but actually gives himself, and this
in such a way that this self-comm'nication can be received? We shall show that the essence of
this "supernatural" religion and the primary and essential difference between this religion and
what we just called "natural religion" cannot be subsumed under a univocal concept of
religion.
At this point we must state that, at least in Christianity, there can be a "presence" of God as
the condition and object of what we are accustomed to call religion in the usual sense only
insofar as the representation of this presence of God (in human word, in sacrament, in a
church, in a revelation, in a scripture, and so on) can essentially be nothing other than
something categorical which points to the transcendental presence of God. If indeed God is to
remain himself even in being mediated to us, if he is to be present to us in mediated
immediacy as the one infinite reality and as the ineffable mystery, and if in this sense religion
is to be possible, then this event must take place on the basis of transcendental experience as
such. It must be a modality of this transcendental relationship, and this relationship does
allow for an immediacy to God. Moreover, the categorical appearance and concreteness of
this immediacy cannot be given in its categorical finiteness as such, but only in its character
of pointing to the modality of this transcendental relationship to God which gives immediacy.
… the concrete immediacy of God to us as is presupposed by and takes place in concrete
religions must be a moment in and a modality of our transcendental and at the same time
historically mediated immediacy to God. A special "intervention" of God, therefore, can only
be understood as the historical concreteness of the transcendental self-communication of God
which is already intrinsic to the concrete world. Such an "intervention" of God always takes
place, first of all, from out of the fundamental openness of finite matter and of a biological
system towards spirit and its history, and, secondly, from out of the openness of the spirit
towards the history of the transcendental relationship between God and the created person in
their mutual freedom. Consequently, every real intervention of God in his world, although it
is free and cannot be deduced, is always only the becoming historical and becoming concrete
of that "intervention" in which God as the transcendental ground of the world has from the
outset embedded himself in this world as its self-communicating ground.
3) Rahner on Christology
If, therefore, the Logos becomes man, then this humanity of his is not something which exists
antecedently, but rather is that which comes to be and is constituted in its essence and
existence if and insofar as the Logos empties himself. This man is precisely as man the selfexpression of God in his self-emptying, because God expresses precisely himself if he
empties himself, if he discloses himself as love, if he conceals the majesty of his love and
manifests himself in the ordinariness of man. If we were not to understand it this way, then
ultimately the humanity of the Logos which he has assumed would be a disguise of God,
really only a signal which discloses nothing at all of him who is there, except perhaps through
human words. But the utterance and the validation of these words could just as well be
understood if they were not the words of the incarnate Logos of God himself. But we cannot
understand the Incarnation in such a way that the Logos becomes man and then says
something about God only by the fact that he speaks. For the moment we understand it this
way, the Incarnation of God would be superfluous. For God could also call forth and express
in some other prophet the words which the man Jesus as the messenger of God says about
God. The man Jesus must be the self-revelation of God through who he is and not only
through his words, and this he really cannot be if precisely this humanity were not the
expression of God.
MAN AS THE CIPHER OF GOD
… the fact that Christ in his reality says exactly what we are renders the content of our
essence and of our history redeemed, and opens it into the freedom of God. It says what we
are: the utterance in which God could empty himself, could express himself into that empty
nothingness which necessarily surrounds him. For he is love and therefore he is necessarily
the miracle of the possibility of a free gift, and therefore as love he is the incomprehensibly
self-evident. From this perspective we could define man, driving him all the way back to his
deepest and most obscure mystery, as that which comes to be when God's self-expression, his
Word, is uttered into the emptiness of the Godless void in love. It is also for this reason that
the incarnate Logos has been called the abbreviated Word of God. The abbreviation, the
cipher of God of himself is man, that is, the Son of Man and the men who exist ultimately
because there was to be a Son Of Man. Man is the radical question about God which, as
created by God, can also have an answer, an answer which in its historical manifestation and
radical tangibility is the God-Man, and which is answered in all of us by God himself. This
takes place at the very center of the absolute questionableness of our being in and through
what we call grace, God's self-communication and beatific vision. When God wants to be
what is not God, man comes to be. This of course does not define man in terms of the flatness
of the ordinary and the everyday, but introduces him into the ever incomprehensible mystery.
But he is this mystery. For in this way he becomes precisely someone who participates in the
infinite mystery of God, just as a question participates in its answer, and just as the question
is borne only by the possibility of the answer itself. We know this by the fact that we
recognize the incarnate Logos in our history and say: here the question which we are is
answered historically and tangibly with God himself. From this point we could reach the
Christian dogma of the Incarnation of the eternal Logos. If God himself is man and remains
so for all eternity; if therefore all theology is eternally anthropology; if it is forbidden to man
to think little of himself because he would then be thinking little of God; and if this God
remains the insoluble mystery: then man is for all eternity the expression of the mystery of
God which participates for all eternity in the mystery of its ground. Even when everything
provisional will have passed away, God will still have to be accepted as the unfathomable
mystery of beatifying love, unless we might think that we could comprehend God's selfexpression outwards, so that both it and we could finally become boring for ourselves.
Because it is the union of the real essence of God and of man in God's personal selfexpression in his eternal Logos, for this reason Christology is the beginning and the end of
anthropology, and this anthropology in its most radical actualization is for all eternity
theology. It is first of all the theology which God himself has spoken by uttering his Word as
our flesh into the emptiness of what is not God and is even sinful, and, secondly, it is the
theology which we ourselves do in faith when we do not think that we could find Christ by
going around man, and hence find God by going around the human altogether.
It could still be said of the creator with the Old Testament that he is in heaven and we are on
earth. But we have to say of the God whom we profess in Christ that he is exactly where we
are, and only there is he to be found. If nevertheless he remains infinite, this does not mean
that he is also still this, but means that the finite itself has received infinite depths. The finite
is no longer in opposition to the infinite, but is that which the infinite himself has become,
that in which he expresses himself as the question which he himself answers.
… God himself has become the reality of what is nothing by itself, and vice versa. Because in
the Incarnation the Logos creates the human reality by assuming it, and assumes it by
emptying himself, for this reason there also applies here, and indeed in the most radical and
specific and unique way, the axiom for understanding every relationship between God and
creatures, namely, that closeness and distance, or being at God's disposal and being
autonomous, do not vary for creatures in inverse, but rather in direct proportion. Christ is
therefore man in the most radical way, and his humanity is the most autonomous and the
most free not in spite of, but because it has been assumed, because it has been created as
God's self-expression.
The humanity of Christ is not the "form of God's appearance" in such a way that it would be
an empty and shadowy appearance which would have no validity of its own in the presence
of and vis-a-vis the one who appears. By the fact that God himself ex-ists, this finite
existence of his receives in the most radical way its own validity, power and reality even visa-vis God himself. This shows that every conception of the Incarnation in which the
humanity of Jesus would only be the livery of God which he uses to signal that he is present
and speaking is a heretical conception. And it is basically this heresy, which was rejected by
the church itself in its struggle against docetism, apollinarism, monophysitism and
monothelitism, which is perceived today as mythological and is rejected as mythology, and
not a really orthodox Christology. We also have to admit that such a mythological
understanding of the Christological dogma of our faith can also be present implicitly in very
many Christians however orthodox their formulas are, and hence it inevitably provokes a
protest against mythology.
But the converse is also true: some who reject the orthodox formulas of Christology because
they misunderstand them may nevertheless on the really experienced level actually believe in
the Incarnation of God's Word in genuine faith. For if a person really believes with regard to
Jesus, his cross and his death that there the living God has spoken to him the final, decisive,
comprehensive and irrevocable word, and if with regard to Jesus a person realizes that he is
thereby redeemed from all the imprisonment and tyranny of the existentials of a closed and
guilty existence which is doomed to death, he believes something which is true and real only
if Jesus is the person whom Christian faith professes him to be. Whether he knows it
reflexively or not, he believes in the Incarnation of God's Word.
ON THE IMPORTANCE AND THE LIMITS OF DOGMATIC FORMULAS
When we say that basically such a person believes in the Incarnation of God's Word,
although he rejects the correct and orthodox Christian formulas because, due perhaps to no
fault of his own, he cannot assimilate them, this does not lessen the importance of a formula
which is objectively correct and is the ecclesial, sociological basis of the common thought
and faith of Christians. But in the actual living out of his existence someone can believe
Christologically although he does not adhere to the formulas of some particular objective
conceptualization of Christology. The living out of existence does not admit of every position
which is logically conceivable, even on the existentiell level. We can say then: anyone who
accepts Jesus as the ultimate truth of his life and professes that God has spoken the ultimate
word to him in Jesus and in his death, not all the penultimate words which we still have to
find ourselves in our own history, but the ultimate word for which he lives and dies, he
thereby accepts Jesus as the Son of God as the church professes him to be. This is true
whatever the theoretically inadequate or even false conceptualization might sound like In his
own formulation of the faith in which he is living out his existence.
Moreover, and we shall be discussing this more extensively in a later section where we treat
the question of Jesus in the non-Christian religions, many have already encountered Christ
who did not know that they had done so