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 (more…)
One Man's Journey 