For Karl Rahner, salvation is a relationship between God and humans, though many of the details of this relationship can not be known by humans. According to Rahner, redemption was not needed because of sin (Weger 174). Humans were created with the incarnation of Christ as the goal (Theological 165). Salvation history is the history of a relationship between God and humans that was created by God, transformed by Christ, and is either accepted or rejected by humanity. There is a tension in Rahner’s soteriology between the freedom of God and the needs of creation, as well as between the freedom of humans and their absolute dependence on God. Rahner does not resolve these tensions, recognizing the limits of human knowledge.
To start discussing Karl Rahner’s soteriology, it can help to start by looking at Rahner’s Christology, and where Christ fits into Rahner’s Trinitarian theology. According to Rahner, biblical theology should be the source of Christology and dogmatic theology (Theological 154). Rahner opposes “the consignment of the Trinity to theological and spiritual irrelevance” and instead emphasizes the importance of looking at God as a triune God (Braaten 105). Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas after him taught that any of the three persons of the Trinity could have chosen to become incarnate (Gelpi 6). Rahner teaches otherwise, using the language of processions as it is used in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica (147-151). “According to Rahner, the Word, and only the Word, could have become flesh because in the divine processions of the Trinity the Word, and not the Holy Spirit, is the real symbolic expression of the Father” (Gelpi 8). “The procession of the Son from the Father is, moreover, a reality connected necessarily with the divine self-knowledge, without which God’s absolute act of cognitional self-possession is impossible” (Gelpi 10). Christ is a concrete self-disclosure of God (Theological 100). The Trinity must be as it is for God to be who God is.
The consequence of the Word being an essential self-revelation of the first person of the Trinity is that “if the Father is to reveal himself to [humans] in time, this revelation must take place in and through the Word, who is the perfect symbolic expression of the Father” (Gelpi 11). The Word reveals the Father to humanity not only by what the Word says, but by what the Word is (Gelpi 12). When saying that the Word becomes incarnate, or ‘became flesh’, one is not saying that the Word merely takes on a body, but that the Word takes on all that it is to be human (Gelpi 11). The human nature of Christ must be essential for the Word to be a true symbol or revelation of the Father in the world and in time, otherwise Christ never would have had a human nature (Gelpi 12-13). In Rahner’s Christology, Christ not only had human and divine natures, but had to have them. Salvation and the transfiguration of the world depend upon the unique event of the Incarnation of Christ (Theological 106).
When Rahner looks at the mystery of God, he also looks at the mystery of humanity, seeing the two as “great and complementary mysteries” (Gelpi 11). God, being beyond the limits of “immediate human experience” is a mystery; humanity is also a mystery in that at the very core of every human is a hunger that is “essential openness to the boundless, the unlimited, the mysterious” that is God (Gelpi 11). As did Irenaeus, Rahner sees humanity as ordered towards its creator (Irenaeus 94). When one sees these two mysteries as described here, one discovers that when the Word became incarnate, the Word assumed “a nature which is by its essence an openness to God” (Gelpi 11). Rahner believes that Christ’s humanity had an active role in redemption (Gelpi 6). One way to understand Jesus Christ’s role in redemption is as the Mediator between God and humans (Theological 156). Jesus Christ can only be considered a mediator between God and humans if he was both truly God and truly human and had both natures within himself, otherwise he would simply be a mediator to himself (Theological 155-157). Rahner’s description of the role of mediator reflects language also used by Irenaeus, saying that salvation “required the Mediator of God and [humans], through His kinship to both… presenting [humanity] to God, revealing God to [humanity]” (Irenaeus 55).
Theologians, including Anselm of Canterbury, have seen Christ as a necessary Redeemer because Christ was the only one who could pay the debt humans owed to God (Scholastic 120). Rahner speaks of redemption in his soteriology, but not of sacrifice, substitute or payment. Instead, he speaks of mediation or transformation. Karl Rahner argues that God is free to save or reject anyone, not bound to “give the devil his due” as others might argue (Braaten 61). This is not to say that Rahner does not see sin or consequences of sin. For Rahner, human history “is a history of enduring the consequences of sin, as well as a history of salvation” (Ludlow 159). One of the consequences of sin is death, and Rahner has developed a theology of death and how Christ has transformed it. Some theologians, including St. Athanasius, find it important to say that Christ conquered death (Athanasius 44). Rahner instead speaks of how Christ transformed what death is.
Rahner views the passive experience of physical breakdown as an “imperfect sort of death which is the consequence of sin” (Ludlow 153). “Rahner claims that the passive sort of death is not so much a punishment imposed externally by God; rather it is the intrinsic consequence of sin” (Ludlow 153). According to Rahner, we have an option about experiencing death actively, as well as passively, now that Christ has died and transformed death. Christ set an example of responding to the passive experience of death by making an active decision to abandon himself to God in hope (Ludlow 154). Rahner describes following this example as “dying with Christ” (Ludlow 154). Now that death has been transformed, death is not just an end, but a “summing-up or consummation” of life (Ludlow 151). The “universal fact of death… shapes each human life and makes it into a history” (Ludlow 151). Death is not just a moment at the end of life, but it affects and shapes all of human life (Ludlow 155). With this understanding, death is not necessarily a “process of physical break-up” but can possibly be, under some circumstances, “a pure, active self-affirmation” through which one undergoes transformation from one life to another (Ludlow 152).
When it comes to discussing what happens in this next life, Rahner gives some mixed messages. First of all, Rahner states that hope is not limited to the mortal life but is permanently a part of our relationship with God (Ludlow 126). But Rahner also argues that decisions which are “made in life are made definitive by death because, Rahner asserts, eternity is not the infinite continuation of time, but the timeless consummation or fulfillment of time” (Ludlow 155). Rahner “criticizes religious theories which allow for second chances in a world beyond or in reincarnation into this world, on the grounds that they devalue decisions made before death” (Ludlow 157). A tension forms between “the possibility of further development after death”, and Rahner’s claim that this further development does not allow for a change of decision in an individual’s relationship with God (Ludlow 157-8).
Rahner does take sin seriously, and recognizes it has consequences, including death. On the other hand, Rahner does not see the need for redemption as one of the consequences of sin. In his own words, “the creature’s sinful act, while it does indeed involve total disaster for the creature itself, is nevertheless incapable of leaving the field of God’s ultimate will- the will by which God wills [God’s] glory” (Theological 111). One of Rahner’s themes is the freedom of God. God’s self-communication to humans through the incarnation of the Word was not inevitable, especially not in the way in which God chose to do it (Ludlow 129). Instead, God’s chosen manner of self-communication was a gift of the “freest possible love because [God] could have refrained from this and been happy in [Godself]” (Ludlow 129). God did not redeem humans because God had to. Redemption is not needed because of sin, which could not frustrate God’s will to save, but God freely chose to transform humans in a manner which deifies humans “to such an extent that this transfiguration occurs and continues as the creature’s total acceptance of… being divinely accepted in… freedom” (Weger 174-6). This language of transformation and acceptance resonates with Irenaeus’ words of adoption. “The Son of God became the Son of Man, so that through Him we might receive adoption” (Irenaeus 54).
As far as Rahner is concerned, the incarnation of the Word is what “gives to human nature its whole meaning and purpose” (Gelpi 11). The Incarnation of the Logos is the ontologically “unambiguous goal of the movement of creation as a whole, in relation to which everything prior is merely a preparation of the scene (Theological 165). The Incarnation of the Word is the fullness of the history of Divine Revelation in the world, and the end of that history (Theological 167). Creation, as a whole, can be called exterior to God in that it is other than God. “What is exterior to God is never in itself resolved into an ultimate, all-embracing harmony” (Theological 111). The resolution had to come from God. God’s self-communication is intrinsic to the human being (Ludlow 128).
God willed humans to be “the arena for the communication of God’s own self” from the very beginning (Ludlow 128). From this it follows that the incarnation was not an event that occurred because God needed to repair the damage from Adam’s sin, but that the incarnation of the Word is the reason for God creating humanity, and the rest of the world, from the beginning (Gelpi 11-12). “The salvific history of the world is, then, a unity; and at its center is Christ” (Gelpi 12). With this in mind, we come to realize that “consummation or salvation is the gracious fulfillment of the human relationship with God in which the individual will be related to God in knowledge and love” (Ludlow 129). Salvation history has to do with the relationship between God and humans, Creator and creations.
So far we have established that, in Rahner’s soteriology, humans were created by God to have a relationship with God, and the second person of the triune God became incarnate to transform this relationship. We have also mentioned that “Rahner rejects the theory of satisfaction… according to which God forgives men’s sins only by means of the infinite satisfaction of the God-man on the cross” (Weger 172). Rahner rejects this theory “because sin is, in his view, an infinite offence against God” (Weger 172). “What happens in saving history is not the natural outcome of some unchanging ideal law, but the free, incalculable, ever new Event of God’s activity” (Theological 87). The question of how Christ redeemed sins, if not as an act of payment, sacrifice or substitute, remains.
For Rahner, the redemption of the world lays solely in the fact that it has been “physically indissolubly linked, in the humanity of Jesus, with God” (Weger 173). By taking on human nature, Jesus Christ transformed that nature; by dying, he transformed death. God does not only affect humans from the outside, but becomes the innermost of the humans’ “constitutional elements” (Ludlow 128). The “formal value of Christ’s redemptive act” and “its concrete content” are both essential for soteriology (Theological 192). “We are saved and redeemed because Jesus and in him God accepted this ultimate impotence of death- a powerlessness that can only be accepted in trust or rejected in despair- and because this acceptance began with the incarnation and was made definitive in death” (Weger 174). “In death, Christ’s human nature becomes… the unique bond linking the material universe and all [humans] in it to the Father in a relationship of eternal reconciliation” (Gelpi 26).
Rahner does not see the death of Christ as an isolated event, but as one that must be viewed in relationship to Christ’s resurrection (Weger 171-2). Any soteriological significance found in Christ’s death can only be found in Christ’s death as it relates to his resurrection (Weger 172). The death and resurrection of Christ, each of which is meaningless without the other, “transformed the whole of Christian living and dying” (Gelpi 27). Rahner argues that “the resurrection was not the beginning of a new period in the life of Jesus which was filled with something new and different that continued time, but a continuation of the same, unique and unrepeatable life, now made definitive, as Jesus made his life definitive and lasting by his free death in obedience” (Weger 172). The fact of Jesus’ death, for Rahner’s soteriology, is not as important as “Jesus’ obedient acceptance of death, which began with the incarnation itself” (Weger 173). Only by Christ’s death and obedience, which could only be realized in that death, could redemption have occurred (Theological 193). “Jesus’ crucifixion brings about [humanity’s] salvation because the climax of human impotence is combined with absolute trust in the Father. Whether or not this might have been manifested in a different death, or if Jesus had died differently must remain a matter for purely theoretical speculation” (Weger 174).
Reading this, it begins to look like Rahner holds the view that God imposes salvation on people. This does not sound like the relationship or dialogue mentioned above. This sounds like humans have been saved and have no say in the matter. Rahner does not want to say this, and always makes certain to emphasize human freedom in accepting or rejecting God.
When talking about human freedom, one could say one is free because one can choose what clothes to wear, or that one is bound for one can not choose what circumstances one is born into. That is not the sort of freedom Rahner discusses in his theology. He discusses a specific human freedom which, by its very nature, is “concerned with the freely achieved final end of the subject as such” (Grace 210). This interpretation of human freedom is very important to Rahner, but his discussion of it becomes paradoxical. On one hand, Rahner argues that human freedom is the freedom to say “yes” or “no” to God (Grace 209). On the other hand, “Rahner is very clear that God is both the gift of salvation and that which makes the acceptance of the gift possible” (Ludlow 253). Rahner insists that it must be possible to deny God, or humans could not be called free (Grace 208). Yet he also teaches that the “continuing responsible freedom [of humanity] is enslaved by the demonic powers of sin and death and even by the law, and… it must be freed to the love of the law by the grace of God” (Grace 210). There is a tension between the idea of human freedom, and the idea of total dependency on God. Rahner wants to say that God is both the source and goal of the movement, without ceasing to be God or preventing humans from being human (Ludlow 128). It can be difficult to see how all this can be possible. Let us first look at human freedom and the possibility of saying yes to God.
“God’s activity in the course of saving history is not a kind of monologue which God conducts by [Godself]; it is a long, dramatic dialogue between God and [God’s] creature, in which God confers of [humans] the power to make a genuine answer to [God’s] Word” (Theological 111). God is a person who relates to humans through a historical dialogue, allowing them to also be people (Theological 110). While Rahner views salvation as the “consummation of God’s self-communication to humanity”, he does not see humans as passive recipients of this communication, but as people invited to participate within it (Ludlow 127-8). Humans are able to accept God. While “divine grace is the fundamental cause of salvation, people must do something to accept that grace in such a way that it transforms them” (Ludlow 248-9). What people must do includes but goes beyond “consciously committing oneself in faith to God” as such a commitment can be made through living “a life of selfless love” (Ludlow 249). Here we see that Rahner tries to bridge the oft perceived gap between faith and works (Ludlow 249).
Rahner also insists that humans can set their will “in opposition to God’s plan of salvation” (Theological 110). God, though personal, transcends the created order to such an extent that God can allow the created order, which is completely dependent upon God, to genuinely act free from God, even in regards to God (Theological 110). Humans can reject God. This is where things get a little confusing, because even though this is true, and humans have the power to reject God, God is still there (Theological 111).
While defining freedom, Rahner says both that humans can accept or reject God and that “human freedom is not absolute autonomy (in other words freedom from God), but rather living in the manner for which humanity was created: a life in and with God (freedom in God)” (Ludlow 253). Thus, he defines freedom as “the all-pervading influence of God on the world” which might be thought of as a constraining force but Rahner sees as freedom and “the very life-force of creation” (Ludlow 253). Here is what might either be called a contradiction or a paradox comes back in. The sort of freedom which Rahner argues exists “seems to be heading towards an ultimate and inevitable positive resolution: universal salvation. But this conflicts with his frequent insistence that humans can reject God” (Ludlow 253-4). This conflict is never really resolved, and Rahner seems content to leave the paradox as is. Taking God’s love into account, we know God wills to save everyone (Braaten 61). Taking God’s freedom into account, we know God can save everyone (Braaten 61). However, according to Barth, we must take the possibility of eternal rejection seriously and realize that God is free to condemn as well as save (Braaten 61). “The threat of eternal condemnation is real for all people, but God will not necessarily actualize this possibility” (Braaten 61).
To underline the contrasting points of freedom and dependence in Rahner’s soteriology, one can further look at how Rahner also claims that because God can only be opposed if God created someone with the freedom to oppose God, the mere act of opposing God paradoxically affirms God (Grace 208). Even those who exercise their freedom to deny God, can only do so because God created them with the ability to do so. Grace exists as an offer of salvation which may be accepted or rejected, yet determines the existence of those who do either (Weger 87-88).
After this discussion on the paradoxes found in how Rahner describes salvation and redemption, the next point of interest is naturally who gets redeemed under this soteriology. Interestingly enough, considering how Rahner’s view of freedom seems slanted towards it, “Rahner does not set out a formal argument for universal salvation, even as a hope” (Ludlow 243). There is no “right thing” that one must do or accomplish. The activity of God through Christ can not be claimed as deserved, but only received as a free gift of pure grace (Theological 108-9). Viewed the right way, this statement actually opens up the category of who might be freed. Rahner does not say that one has to be a Christian in order to accept God’s salvific act through Christ.
“We are redeemed and saved in and through Christ” (Weger 171) but God started revealing God’s self through God’s Word before the Word became incarnate in Jesus Christ. “God’s central and saving definitive saving act, one precisely for that reason different from all the others, is the single inner unity of Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection, in which [God] definitively and radically communicated [Godself] to the world and in which [God] really came to us” (Theological 88). With this understanding, all of God’s earlier saving acts can be seen as “intrinsically directed to Christ as their end, and every revealed Word which enters into composition with them and accompanies them thus has intrinsic reference to the definitive and unsurpassable Revelation of God in Christ” (Theological 88). Accordingly, Augustine’s stance that the New Testament is concealed within the old is true to the extent that “the Word of the Old Testament already possesses in actual fact an inner orientation to God’s definitive Word in and through Christ” (Theological 88).
Even today, God is still revealing God’s self to the world, and not only through the Christian faith. God’s revelation in time and space can be called “universal” (Weger 87-88). It is possible to see God’s free salvific activity at work elsewhere “throughout Nature and Grace” (Theological 109). This revelation is not only outside of the self. One’s experience of oneself, if one is a human, is also an experience of God, of grace and of “the transcendental quality that is distinctive to [one’s] experience of God” (Weger 88). Karl Rahner argues that grace exists at all times in the very center of human existence in both knowledge and freedom, and that no human is capable of abandoning “this transcendental peculiarity of [that human’s] being” (Weger 87). The self-communication of God as grace and revelation can be found in all “human knowledge and freedom” to some extent (Ludlow 128). Out of this premise it can be derived that “God communicates God’s self to, or dwells in, each and every human individual” (Ludlow 128). While Rahner is “circumspect about whether the consummation of God’s self-communication (that is, salvation) will actually be achieved for every individual, he is certain that that consummation is at least possible for all” (Ludlow 128). “God’s offer of God’s own self can be experienced in every aspect of each individual’s worldly life and that the acceptance or rejection of God can be enacted in every aspect” (Ludlow 164).
“Karl Rahner coined the phrase ‘anonymous Christians’ for those who participate in the divine grace and salvation through the universal Logos in religious and moral systems other than Christian” (Braaten 5). The concept of anonymous Christians “permits a generous estimate of what God is doing beyond the walls of the church, and it offers a point of contact between biblical religion and the virtues and values of other religions” (Braaten 96). “Karl Rahner has constructed his theory on the basis of the ancient patristic doctrine of the universal Logos” (Braaten 4-5). Grace is “the unfolding within human nature of the union of the human with the Logos”, but this is not limited to those who understand the Logos as Jesus Christ (Theological 199-200).
We have seen tensions in Rahner’s soteriology. Some might even say paradoxes. God is not constrained to act in any particular way, and yet it seems that creation exists with certain intrinsic needs only God can fulfill. Humans are free to accept or reject God, yet humans depend absolutely depend on God and can do nothing outside of the grace of God. Rahner accepts these paradoxes. He understands that there are limits to human knowledge.
Anselm of Canterbury taught that God is such an immense truth that human minds could not understand God, and such a greater being that God could not truly be conceived by us (Scholastic 83-84). Rahner agrees with Anselm in that he feels that there are some things humans are simply incapable of understanding. As said earlier, God does reveal God’s self to the world. God is known through humans’ natural reason from the world (Theological 86). Even though that is true, it is also true that God is a free person transcending the world (Theological 86). Therefore, the knowledge which humans have by nature must “release this personal God” (Theological 86). Despite God’s revelation, there are things that human reason can not deduce, starting with knowledge gained from the created world (Theological 86). One of these things is the specific manner through which God wishes to relate to humans (Theological 86). All that human reason can conclude in terms of religion and relationship to God is that these things are the domain of God and that we must put ourselves into obedience to God, after which God will either be denied by us or we will receive God as a free gift of grace from God (Theological 86).
God communicates Godself to humans in ways that are both mysterious in unique (Ludlow 127). God is God, and thus incomprehensible to limited human reason (Ludlow 127). One might question, if this is the case, why God would reveal God’s self to humans. God’s self-revelation is not so much for the sake of knowledge as for the sake of love and relationship (Ludlow 127). God wants humans to seek after God and God’s will.
In the same way that God, being God, is more than human intellect can comprehend, there are some things that humans, existing in the created realm, can not know from experience or reason from the world around them. The exact details of how salvation works out is one of these things. Rahner argues that “salvation has both a divine and a human dimension” (Ludlow 252-3). Both God and humans participate in salvation history. God’s participation, however, is one of knowledge, power and grace, none of which can originate from humans. No human can be certain about the details of salvation, including the “precise relation of divine and human action” (Ludlow 252-3). The paradoxes mentioned in this essay, according to Rahner, can not be resolved.
Theologians can reflect, research and reason, but they do not reach unassailable conclusions that will stand unchanging until the end of time. “The clearest formulations, the most sanctified formulas, the classic condensations of the centuries-long work of the Church in prayer, reflection and struggle concerning God’s mysteries” are not goals in themselves but means by which to strive towards the greater truth of Truth itself (Theological 149). Every time a theologian answers a question, more questions are raised. The more a person learns, the more that person realizes how much is left to learn. It follows from the nature of human knowledge of truth and from the nature of divine truth itself, that any individual truth, above all one of God’s truths, is beginning and emergence, not conclusion and end” (Theological 149). There is nothing wrong with this. God has made God’s revealed Truth incarnate in history, which means that “neither the abandonment of a formula nor its preservation in a petrified form does justice to human understanding” (Theological 150).
While “one can be sure that God’s salvation is available for all and is already effective in some, there can be no absolute certainty about the details of salvation- who is saved and who is not, what constitutes an acceptance or rejection of God, whether all we be saved” (Ludlow 163). God’s free actions are never at the power of human understanding (Theological 109). “The rightness and holiness of God’s decision rests in itself alone, precisely because it is free; it is not to be traced back to some necessitating source which has the lucidity of necessity” (Theological 109-110).
God is beyond the limits of human knowledge, but this does not mean we should not strive to know or understand God as much as we can (Ludlow 126). Rahner has pointed out many paradoxes and tensions that a Christian can deal with in forming a soteriology. Instead of ignoring whatever does not support his view, coming firmly down on one side and ignoring the other, or trying to find an answer that reconciles all possible responses, Rahner accepts the tensions and paradoxes. Humans can not earn their salvation, but are invited to participate in it. Humans are completely dependent on God, yet God created humans as free persons. God is free to save or condemn, and is not bound in how God chooses to do either, yet God created humans needing a certain relationship and fulfillment that could only come through the Incarnation of the Word. God’s relationship to humanity is one of divine revelation and self-communication (Ludlow 126). This revelation was not a one-time event, but is a relationship and a history which has been fulfilled and transformed in Christ. Rahner sees human salvation, whatever the fine details are, as having been achieved the same way: humans have been fulfilled and transformed in Christ.
Works Cited
Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica. vol.1. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican
Province. Maryland: Christian Classics.
Athanasius the Great, St. On the Incarnation. Willits: Eastern Orthodox Books.
Braaten, Carl E. No Other Gospel! Christianity among the World’s Religions. Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1992.
Gelpi S.J., Donald L. Life and Light: a guide to the theology of Karl Rahner. New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1966.
Irenaeus. The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies. Selected Hans Urs von Balthasar. Trans. John Saward. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1981.
Ludlow, Morwenna. Universal Salvation: Eschatology in the thought of Gregory of Nyssa and
Karl Rahner. Oxford: University Press, 2000.
Rahner, Karl. Grace in Freedom. Trans. Hilda Graef. Herder: Palm, 1969.
Rahner, Karl. Theological Investigations Vol. 1: God, Christ, Mary and Grace. Trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P. London: Darton, 1961.
Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, A. Ed. Eugene R. Fairweather. Philadelphia, Westminster, 1956.
Weger, Karl-heinz. Karl Rahner: an introduction to his theology. New York: Seabury, 1980.
