UNDERSTANDING KARLRAHNER
An Introduction to His Life and Thought
Herbert Vorgrimler
Crossroad, 1986
198 pp., $ 15.95
KAL RAHNER IN DIALOGUE
Conversations and Interviews, 1965-1982
Paul Imhof, Hubert Biallowons, and Harvey D.Egan, eds.
Crossroad, 1986
376 pp., $ 22.50
WILL IT LIBERATE?
Questions about Liberation Theology
Michael Novak
Paulist Press, 1986
307 pp., $ 14.95
Although his bibliography ran to some 4,000 items at the time of his death in 1984, Karl Rahner's essential message was a simple one: "Human persons, in every age, always and everywhere, whether they realize it and reflect on it or not, are in relationship with the unutterable mystery of human life that we call God." In explicating that one, basic truth in books and essays translated into dozens of languages, Rahner became the most influential Catholic theologian of the twentieth century. The contest for Rahner's legacy - more so than far more visible, controversial theologians like Hans Kung, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Leonardo Boff - will determine the course of Catholic intellectual life into the twenty-first century.
The bare facts of Rahner's largely uneventful life seem to belie the significance of his accomplishment and the importance of the argument over his lifework. Born in Swabia in 1904, into what he later described as a "normal, middle-class, Christian family," Rahner entered the Jesuits after graduating from high school, and remained with them for the next sixty-two years of his life. He followed the normal course of Jesuit studies but ran into his first academic thornbush after his priestly ordination in 1932, when his superiors sent him to study philosophy at the University of Freiburg.
In those days, Freiburg meant the great German existentialist Martin Heidegger, and Rahner was soon enrolled in Heidegger's exclusive seminar. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, however, for a Catholic philosopher, Martin Honecker, and as Rahner once reminisced, Honecker "flunked me." Honecker wanted Rahner to do a historical thesis, in the manner of Catholic neo-scholasticism; Rahner wanted to do an original piece of philosophical speculation, reading St. Thomas Aquinas through the lens of modern Kantian philosophy. Rahner lost the battle but won the war. For, after quickly completing a doctorate in theology and becoming professor of dogmatics at the University of Innsbruck, Rahner began to pour out a seemingly endless stream of writings on virtually every aspect of Catholic doctrine. After fending off the attacks of his intellectual enemies in Rome, Rahner was named an official theological adviser to the Second Vatican council (1962-1965), whose central documents bear his distinctive theological stamp. In the years after the Council, Rahner's Theological Investigations (which eventually ran to twenty English volumes), and the theological encyclopedia he edited (Sacramentum Mundi),
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