Karl Rahner Quotes

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

When man is with God in awe and love, then he is praying.

The number one cause of atheism is Christians. Those who proclaim Him with their mouths and deny Him with their actions is what an unbelieving world finds unbelievable.

Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.

Meditating on the nature and dignity of prayer can cause saying at least one thing to God: Lord, teach us to pray!

Only in love can I find you, my God. In love the gates of my soul spring open, allowing me to breathe a new air of freedom and forget my own petty self. In love my whole being streams forth out of the rigid confines of narrowness and anxious self-assertion, which make me a prisoner of my own poverty emptiness. In love all the powers of my soul flow out toward you, wanting never more to return, but to lose themselves completely in you, since by your love you are the inmost center of my heart, closer to me than I am to myself.

For it is the bitter grief of theology and its blessed task, too, always to have to seek (because it does not clearly have present to it at the time)...always providing that one has the courage to ask questions, to be dissatisfied, to think with the mind and heart one ACTUALLY has, and not with the mind and heart one is SUPPOSED TO have.

The dead are silent because they live, just as we chatter so loudly to try to make ourselves forget that we are dying. Their silence is really their call to me, the assurance of their immortal love for me.

The twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner commented that “God” is the last sound we should make before falling silent, and Saint Augustine, long ago, said, “si comprehendis, non est Deus” (if you understand, that isn’t God). All of this formal theologizing is but commentary on that elusive and confounding voice from the burning bush: “I am who am.

The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.

In the midst of our lives, of our freedom and our struggles, we have to make a radical, absolute decision. And we never know when lightening will strike us out of the blue. It may be when we least expect to be asked whether we have the absolute faith and trust to say yes

Karl Rahner, a twentieth-century admirer of Augustine, once said that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that, in this life, all symphonies must remain unfinished.

If we have been given the vocation and grace to die with Christ then the everyday and banal occurrence which we call human death has been elevated to a place among God's mysteries.

Every state of life, every decision, includes some pain that must be accepted if you are to enter fully into those decisions, and into new life. “All symphonies remain unfinished,” said Karl Rahner. There is no perfect decision, perfect outcome, or perfect life. Embracing imperfection helps us relax into reality. When we accept that all choices are conditional, limited, and imperfect, our lives become, paradoxically, more satisfying, joyful, and peaceful.

In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been travelled. It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only because it is can we be borne by it. Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery?

Govorom o anonimnome kršćanstvu Rahner je nastojao posredovati osjećaj za Božju širinu i za crkvenu uskoću.

to be oriented towards God is what makes us human, then the one who is so oriented towards God that he is utterly given over to God, and utterly taken over by God, is actually the one who is at the same time the most fully human.

It would be all right if I could pray in this way, or in that other way, if I were just able to give You the only thing You want: not my thoughts and feelings and resolutions, but myself. But that is just what I am unable to do, because in the superficiality of the ordinary routine into which my life is cast, I am a stranger to myself. And how can I seek You, being so distant, how can I give myself up to You, when I haven't been able as yet to find myself?

For a Catholic understanding of the faith there is no reason why the basic concern of Evangelical Christianity as it comes to expression in the three “only's” should have no place in the Catholic Church. Accepted as basic and ultimate formulas of Christianity, they do not have to lead a person out of the Catholic Church. . . . They can call the attention of the Catholic church again and again to the fact that grace alone and faith alone really are what saves, and that with all our maneuvering through the history of dogma and the teaching office, we Catholic Christians must find our way back to the sources again and again, back to the primary origins of Holy Scripture and all the more so of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus does not change God’s mind. Jesus does not turn God’s wrath to mercy. Christ’s death does not persuade God to be gracious, but is itself an expression, or rather the definitive expression, of God’s graciousness. The incarnation is a high point in the history of salvation rather than a turning point.

The darkness is still with us, O Lord. You are still hidden and the world which you have made does not want to know you or receive you . . . You are still the hidden child in a world grown old . . . You are still obscured by the veils of this world’s history, you are still destined not to be acknowledged in the scandal of your death on the cross . . . But I, O hidden Lord of all things, boldly affirm my faith in you. In confessing you, I take my stand with you . . . If I make this avowal of faith, it must pierce the depths of my heart like a sword, I must bend my knee before you, saying, I must alter my life. I have still to become a Christian. —Karl Rahner, PRAYERS FOR MEDITATION

Orthodoxy is the wide open field within which successful breeding can take place. If one maintains that Jesus was an eater of magic mushrooms or a Martian, then this will not make for fertility. There is not enough in common for there to be intercourse in any sense. How different can two believers be for the encounter to be fertile? This is a complex question which we do not need to explore here. Of course ultimately we must share orthodoxy, but this is not to narrow the scope of the conversation; it is to enter the broad terrain of the mystery, in which we are liberated from the tightness of ideology. It is a serious misuse of language to use the word 'orthodox' to mean conservative or, even worse, rigid. Orthodoxy does not lie in the unvarying and thoughtless repetition of received formulas. As Karl Rahner pointed out, that can be a form of heresy. Orthodoxy is speaking about our faith in ways that keep open the pilgrimage towards the mystery. Often it is hard to know immediately whether a new statement of belief is a new way of stating our faith or its betrayal. It takes time for us to tell.

God’s becoming incarnate in the world is not first and foremost a response to the problem posed by sin. It is instead a climactic moment in a positive movement towards the world, a movement which would have taken place even had there been no such thing as sin. Had Adam not fallen, to put it in traditional language, Christ would still have come into the world, would still have died, and would still have risen again. Rahner does not deny the reality or the gravity of sin and evil, nor does he deny that, in fact, the incarnation, cross and resurrection have something to do with the forgiveness of sin. But this is not all that they are; Christ is not just the remedy for our sins. Sin, as Rahner sees it, cannot be allowed to be the driving motor of the story of God’s involvement with the world.

All those statistics - the ones about decline - point toward massive theological discontent. People still believe in God. They just do not believe in the God proclaimed and worshipped by conventional religious organizations. Some of the discontented - and there are many of them - do not know what to call themselves. So they check the “unaffiliated” box on religion surveys. They have become secular humanists, agnostics, posttheists, and atheists and have rejected the conventional God. Others say they are spiritual but not religious. They still believe in God but have abandoned conventional forms of congregating. Still others declare themselves “done” with religion. They slink away from religious communities, traditions that once gave them life, and go hiking on Sunday morning. Some still go to church, but are hanging on for dear life, hoping against hope that something in their churches will change. They pray prayers about heaven that no longer make sense and sing hymns about an eternal life they do not believe in. They want to be in the world, because they know they are made of the same stuff as the world and that the world is what really matters, but some nonsense someone taught them once about the world being bad or warning of hell still echoes in their heads. They are afraid to say what they really think or feel for fear that no one will listen or care or even understand. They think they might be crazy. All these people are turning toward the world because they intuit that is where they will find meaning and awe, that which those who are still theists call God. They are not crazy. They are part of this spiritual revolution - people discovering God in the world and a world that is holy, a reality that enfolds what we used to call heaven and earth into one. These people are not secular, even though their main concern is the world; they are not particularly religious (in the old-fashioned understanding of the term), even though they are deeply aware of God. They are fashioning a way of faith between conventional theism and any kind of secularism devoid of the divine. In our time, people are turning toward the numinous presence that animates the world, what theologian Rudolf Otto called “the Holy.” They are those who are discovering a deeply worldly faith. Decades ago Catholic theologian Karl Rahner made a prediction about devout people of the future. He said they would either be “mystics,” those who have “experienced something ,” or “cease to be anything at all”; and if they are mystical believers, they will be those whose faith “is profoundly present and committed to the world.” The future of faith would be an earthy spirituality , a brilliant awareness of the spirit that vivifies the world.

Forgiveness is not a commodity that can be handed out. It is a relationship that must be entered into. — Karl Rahner

The Word is, by definition, immanent in the divinity and active in the world, and as such the Father's revelation. A revelation of the Father without the Logos and his incarnation would be like speaking without words.

Rahner’s theology of grace helps fill out his doctrine of God by insisting that the ultimate Goal of human aspiration is not remote but draws near as the loving Source of our spiritual dynamism. The presence of the Holy Spirit within us grounds the spiritual imperative to stay alert for clues to divine grace sustaining and guiding our everyday lives.

As Rahner puts it, “freedom is the capacity for the eternal,” the root power to make ourselves to be what we will be forever. Our task is to get our desires in proper order, to direct our decisions to what is truly good, and to orient our will to God.

Freedom is not merely a neutral capacity to choose among alternatives, nor is it simply the power to revise or reverse decisions. It is rather the capacity for the infinite, the power to do something of permanent validity, to make ourselves to be what we will be forever.

We are interdependent creatures who need others so that we can break out of the prison of selfishness and experience the liberation of caring for others. In turn we perform an important service for others by being receptive to their love.

I must stop the busy routine for a moment and address words of praise to You, Holy Spirit, living within me. I adore You as the Light that illumines my dark moments, the Compass who guides me along the path of moral decisions, the Hope that sustains me when stalked by despair, the Love that propels me out of selfishness into life-giving relationships, and the Power that enables all my prayers. Help me recognize and praise You as the Gift of my life and the Source of my being.

Rahner sees the story as a commentary on the common human temptation to want more, despite already having enough. He thinks this tendency is intensified in our technological age, which makes so many goods readily available.

silence.” At the same time, his death is “the deepest and most personal act of his life.” It is the hour of his glorification, the reason he came into the world. All of his life Jesus was obedient to the will of his Father. This submissive obedience to God has, as Rahner puts it, a “certain mystical sense” about it that defies our usual categories. By his obedience, Jesus absorbs “that which is totally foreign to him, the sinfulness of the world,” and transforms it into the power of God’s love. The obedience of Jesus is “the silent Yes” to his excruciating death, intensified by his sense of abandonment. According to Rahner, the death of Jesus was not only an act of acceptance of suffering but also a loving “Yes” to “the incomprehensibility of God.” It is only through love that human beings can express their essence and escape the prison of selfishness.

Applying the example of Jesus to our own “Gethsemane-existence,” Rahner repeats the good news: “there is no darkness in which God does not live,” and “no abyss greater than the abyss of divine love and mercy.” Jesus, who suffered such emotional torment in the garden, remains for us a sign of hope, especially when we meet defeat and failure on the spiritual journey. The darkest moments cannot finally prevail over the light of divine love.

So God does not first create the world and then, as a kind of after-thought, in response to what goes on in the world, decide to become incarnate. Instead God from the beginning creates what is other than himself in order to give himself to it.

Chinch.

As Rahner puts it: “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.” 3 This soteriology, or theology of salvation, puts the emphasis on God’s ongoing and ultimately triumphant love for all human beings; on the perfect obedience of the man Jesus who is like us in all things but sin; and on the resurrection that vindicates the life and death of Jesus and plants the seeds of the final victory over sin.

Once again, the experience of self is the experience of God. All things are potentially revelatory. Everything that constitutes our human existence can speak to us of God.

Rahner was critical of certain developments in the theology of grace in Western Christianity. Contrary to Augustine’s salvation pessimism that spoke of large numbers who are damned, Rahner emphasized a salvation optimism based on the power and omnipresence of uncreated grace. He insisted that just because grace is a free gift does not mean it is rare.

(1) Karl Barth was not an evangelical. He was a European Protestant wrestling with how to salvage Protestant Christianity in the wake of World War I, which exposed the debacle of liberal theology. Barth was not an inerrantist or a revivalist, and he was wrestling with a different array of issues than the “battle for the Bible.” (2) Karl Barth is on the side of the good guys when it comes to the major ecumenical doctrines about the Trinity and the atonement. Barth is decidedly orthodox and Reformed in his basic stance, though he sees the councils and confessions mainly as guidelines rather than holy writ. (3) Karl Barth arguably gives evangelicals some good tips about how to do theology over and against liberalism. Keep in mind that Karl Barth’s main sparring partner was not Billy Graham or the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, but the European liberal tradition from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Albert Ritschl. For a case in point, whereas Schleiermacher made the Trinity an appendix to his book on Christian Faith because it was irrelevant to religious experience, Barth made the Trinity first and foremost in his Church Dogmatics, which was Barth’s way of saying, “Suck on that one, Schleiermacher!” (4) Evangelicals and the neoorthodox tend to be rather hostile toward each other. Many evangelicals regard the neoorthodox as nothing more than liberalism reloaded, while many neoorthodox theologians regard evangelicals as a more culturally savvy version of fundamentalism. Not true on either score. Evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are both theological renewal movements trying to find a biblical and orthodox center in the post-Enlightenment era. The evangelicals left fundamentalism and edged left toward a workable orthodox center. The neoorthodox left liberalism and edged right toward a workable orthodox center. Thus, evangelicalism and neoorthodoxy are more like sibling rivals striving to be the heirs of the Reformers in the post-Enlightenment age. There is much in Karl Barth that evangelicals can benefit from. His theology is arguably the most christocentric ever devised. He has a strong emphasis on God’s transcendence, freedom, love, and “otherness.” Barth stresses the singular power and authority of the Word of God in its threefold form of “Incarnation, Preaching, and Scripture.” Barth strove with others like Karl Rahner to restore the Trinity to its place of importance in modern Christian thought. He was a leader in the Confessing Church until he was expelled from Germany by the Nazi regime. He preached weekly in the Basel prison. His collection of prayers contain moving accounts of his own piety and devotion to God. There is, of course, much to be critical of as well. Barth’s doctrine of election implied a universalism that he could never exegetically reconcile. Barth never could regard Scripture as God’s Word per se as much as it was an instrument for becoming God’s Word. He never took evangelicalism all that seriously, as evidenced by his famous retort to Carl Henry that Christianity Today was Christianity Yesterday. Barth’s theology, pro and con, is something that we must engage if we are to understand the state of modern theology. The best place to start to get your head around Barth is his Evangelical Theology, but note that for Barth, “evangelical” (evangelische) means basically “not Catholic” rather than something like American evangelicalism. Going beyond that, his Göttingen Dogmatics or Dogmatics in Outline is a step up where Barth begins to assemble a system of theology based on his understanding of the Word of God. Then one might like to launch into his multivolume Church Dogmatics with the kind assistance of Geoffrey Bromiley’s Introduction to the Theology of Karl Barth, which conveniently summarizes each section of Church Dogmatics.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

Moreover, good theology, as theologian Karl Rahner has said, is always pedagogy into mystery, not a way to wrap everything up in small, digestible packets of certainty.

The Christian of the future will be a mystic

Theologian Karl Rahner was once asked if he believed in miracles. His reply? ‘I live on miracles—I couldn’t make it through a day without them.’ Still another name for it is mystery.

For Christians uncomfortable with the notion of Jesus as the victim of divine displeasure, Rahner offers a theology that stresses God’s abiding love and Christ’s free commitment to the cause of God and humanity. As Christians, we commit ourselves to Jesus not as a passive victim of divine wrath but as the faithful one freely accepting death on a cross as a passage to risen life.

When we follow the Jesus way, embrace the Jesus truth, and live the Jesus life, we are on the road to the Father’s house, the house of love. And do I believe that some, drawn by the Holy Spirit, are on this holy way without yet knowing the name of the way? Absolutely. They are what Karl Rahner called “anonymous Christians.

How often I have found out that we grow to maturity not by doing what we like, but by doing what we should. How true it is that not every should is a compulsion, and not every like is a high morality and true freedom.

The only really absolute mysteries in Christianity are the self-communication of God in the depths of existence—which we call grace, and in history—which we call Christ. —Fr. Karl Rahner, Jesuit priest and theologian, 1904–1984 I do not worship matter.

Besser als ihr Ruf ist die Kirche dann und dort, wo sie, wie der Theologe Karl Rahner sagt, auf den »Tutiorismus des Wagnisses« setzt: Wo sie neue Wege beschreitet, auch risikoreiche, und nicht nur altbewährte Pfade bemüht.

Karl Rahner said, ‘I don’t believe in miracles, but they sustain me.

Catholic theology of the time, which made much of what the Jesuit Karl Rahner called the ‘anonymous Christian’, one who might live a graced life without believing church doctrine.

que con vuestra oración hayáis traído realmente ante mi presencia vuestras verdaderas o presuntas necesidades y males, que realmente hayáis acudido a mí, al Santo y Eterno, y que en vuestra oración no mantenéis un mero monólogo de egoísmo ciego con vosotros mismos lo reconoceréis si vuestra petición se transforma en una pregunta dirigida a mí, en esta pregunta a mi inescrutable sabiduría y eterna bondad: ¿qué es mejor para mí, la necesidad o la felicidad, el éxito o el fracaso, la vida o la muerte? Si vuestra petición no se transforma en esa pregunta en el momento en que penetra en la silenciosa incomprensibilidad de mis planes eternos, es un signo de que no habéis orado, sino que os habéis rebelado contra la majestad de vuestro Dios, a quien le corresponde adoración especialmente cuando le pedís ayuda en la necesidad de vuestra existencia terrena».

Another way to think of God’s presence is as an all-encompassing silence that is always there in the background of one’s experience. Imagine that silence as something which is ever present as we encounter the innumerable sounds of daily living. The sounds are going on, but at some deep level, the silence exists. It is the background against which all sounds occur. Occasionally, when the sounds subside—or even in the midst of those sounds--we may “hear” that infinite silence. That is it. That infinite silence is the awareness of God.

Grace did not come about as a result of sin. Grace has been present since the beginning. It was present prior to sin, so that we can speak of primordial grace. Grace is all-pervasive throughout time, such that we can speak of salvation through grace being available at any time in history and to everyone. This is why people who are not explicitly Christian can also experience grace.

God is not something which can be thought about as an “object” of our experience. Rather, God is that by which we are enabled to think.

Regarding the holy mystery, there is nothing beyond it which can be experienced or imagined, and it is incomprehensible. It is “holy” because it desires to express itself in grace and love. The holy mystery has bestowed upon us an “orientation,” a movement, towards it, because it is in the holy mystery that we find our ultimate fulfillment and eternal validation.

We are transformed because God dwells in us rather than having to be transformed before God’s indwelling.

An “ordinary” miracle can happen at any moment in the daily affairs of life. If an event in life, however small, teaches us something significant about ourselves, about God, about love, it is perfectly reasonable to refer to such an event as a miracle. We can see these miraculous events in our daily lives as God’s offer of grace, as God’s self-communication to us, as God’s gift of himself.

the experience of God and grace are one and the same, and that God is the same as grace. Another possibility is to say that, while God is Being, the Infinite itself, grace would be the effective action of God, but experientially both are the same. When one responds affirmatively to God, he is responding affirmatively to grace, and vice versa.