A World of Grace: An Introduction to the Themes and Foundations of Karl Rahner's Theology

12. An Ethics of Faith

12 An Ethics of Faith JAMES F. BRESNAHAN Our fundamental option of response to God's self-gift is expressed in concrete historical acts. Whether those acts can be considered good or bad relates to how they fulfill the basic moral ideal: love of God and love of neighbor. This essay suggests how traditional Catholic natural-law thinking may be revised and renewed by Rahner s theology; it also examines the complementarity of the essential and the existential dimensions of ethics. K, .ARL Rahner's impact on systematic theology is widely acknowledged , but he has only begun to influence the field of ethics. Ethicians analyze human action to determine when it is to be called good and when evil; above all, they try to develop arguments to explain and support their analysis. Particularly if they work within religious traditions as Christian ethicians (or moral theologians) they intend their work to have practical consequences in the lives of their readers. This practical orientation leads them to be preoccupied with problem areas in human living. How can sexual activity be used or abused? Can medical technology be made to serve rather than suppress human interests? Will economic and political power be employed selfishly for a few or altruistically for the increasing millions of deprived persons populating our planet? Rahner seldom touches directly on these staple topics of ethics, and when he does take up one or another of them, he hesitates to infringe on the professional ethician's territory. He limits his contribution to deeper issues which lie behind all that ethicians do but which they frequently do not choose to explain. Rahner elaborates a theory of the human person and of freedom. 769 170 A WORLD OF GRACE In my view, Rahner's thought on freedom and the person will increasingly change the way ethicians, especially Roman Catholic ethicians , develop their descriptions of the moral life and the guidelines for decision and action based on such descriptions. Let me try to highlight the most important elements in Rahner's thought that may reorient natural -law thinking and perhaps make it more adequate to the contemporary challenge faced by ethics. Before doing that, however, we ought to have clearly in mind what this challenge to ethics really involves for all of us. Challenge to Ethics: The New Moral Perplexity Rahner himself speaks over and over again of the new way people today experience their freedom. This experience gave rise to Karl Marx's analysis of work and alienation and to Sigmund Freud's theories of the inner structure of personality lying below the level of consciousness . In philosophy, early glimmerings of the experience caused Immanuel Kant to turn systematic reflection on human knowledge away from human beings as objects of observation toward a new concern for understanding the structures of conscious thought and choice within the subject. Among Catholic thinkers, this new experience of freedom led the Belgian Jesuit, Joseph Marechal, to initiate a style of thought in which Rahner shares. Marechal sought to recast the more objectively oriented philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in the light of Kant's turn to the subject. He inspired his fellow Belgian Jesuit, Gerard Gilleman, to make an early but important sketch of Aquinas's ethics reshaped through attention to the contents of self-awareness in action. The result was Gilleman's The Primacy of Charity in Moral Theology. Rahner's own contribution to ethics derives from this new understanding of freedom and seeks to express it for the Church today. Rahner points out repeatedly that our era is the first to realize that it has the power to/'build the earth," as Teilhard de Chardin would say, or destroy it. The most inspiring and yet also appalling aspect of this power is that it can build or destroy not merely a stage set on which we act out our lives but the very world of which we ourselves are part. Increasingly it will be our own decisions that determine the shape of the world in the future. Our awareness of this power makes us aware of moral dilemma on an unprecedented scale. Whenever we attempt to do good, we seem inevitably to do evil as well, and sometimes prodigious evil. AN ETHICS OF FAITH 111 Examples are ready to hand. Can we make use of atomic power in any truly peaceful way? But can we sustain human civilization without using it? Can we...