After Rahner What?: A Tribute to His Memory and Achievement

AFTER RAHNER WHAT? A TRIBUTE TO HIS MEMORY AND ACHIEVEMENT I SUPPOSE FOR A MOMENT that Karl Rahner had never lived and that his works and all traces of his influence have been removed completely from the surface of the earth. All his books with the numerous translations disappear and long shelves in libraries become empty. Citations, references, ideas and inspirations of his are deleted from all printed materials and many books and articles are reduced therefore to almost nothing. The absence of any books written about him lea.ves further room for other books on library shelves. Teachers and professors of theology who because of Rahner's theological vision could teach or chose theology as their profession disappear from theological schools and theological associations together with their disciples. Like the theological libraries, theological schools and academies are contracted and many book publishers go out of business. Priests and faithful who made Rahner's retreats and heard or read his spiritual exhortations and, as a result, remained faithful in the priesthood, kept their faith, or became converted to the Catholic Church are not so. Their places in the Church are empty. The name Rahner is erased from millions and millions of human brains. Vatican II is not Vatican II as we know it now. And many who knew Rahner as a friend are lonely trying to be satisfied with the less challenging friendship of others. We could go on like this to dramatize the great influence Karl Rahner has had on the world during the last 50 years. One wonders whether there is a professor or teacher of religion anywhere in the world who could say that he or she had never heard that name. 157 158 TIBOR HORVATH, S.J. Indeed, Karl R.ahner could write and say something interesting about the most various issues of human life. His theology was encyclopedic. He could discover and dismantle the theological implications or significance of any topic he put through his scrutinizing theological mind. He was above all an apologete who defended the doctrine of Christian faith as well as the wisdom of school theology. The general schema of the R.ahnerian articles illustrates this. The author first stated the tenets of school theology and challenged them as insufficient . Then he went into a penetrating analysis of human existence in the light of existential philosophy. And finally he showed that the old scholastic teaching had more to say than we had originally thought. Because of this dialectic method he could be and was accused of both rigid orthodoxy and extreme modernism. One would venture to say that R.ahner has influenced the theology of his time as no other theologian has. Even more, he did not just influence his time, he created the time in which he lived, ahead of time. After the Second Vatican Council in 1965 in the preface to the English edition of his Kleines Theologisches Worterbuch first published before Vatican II in 1961, he wrote: "... we note with some satisfaction tha.t nothing whatever needs to be changed because of the Council: our approach seems to be a sound one after all ". One wonders whether there is any other Catholic theologian who could say that he had a theology of Vatican II before Vatican II, who knew post-Vatican II theology before 1961. In contrast, think only of the New Catholic Encyclopedia conceived about the same time as the Kleines Theologisches Worterbuch and which appeared as contemporary with R.ahner's Theological Dictionary , and of the long laborious effort of trying to update it in the spirit of Vatican II. I refer to the updating volumes published in 1974 and 1979. Yet R.ahner, as I knew him, never thought too much of his great achievement. Incarnationalist in his writing, he was eschatologist in his living. In 1952 when he gave an informal talk during recreation-time to a small group of Jesuit scholastics AFTER RAHNER WHAT? A TRIBUTE 159 in Belgium, Rahner presented a very dim view of theology as a discipline at that time. He remarked that there is no one outstanding promising theologian or theological school on the horizon. "The time of the Nouvelle...