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

3. Within the Holy Mystery

3 Within the Holy Mystery MICHAEL J. BUCKLEY The constant questioning in human experience leads us to talk of God—-for God is the context of all reality and experience. The language we use to talk about God, and the knowledge we claim to have, are the subject of this essay, INESCAPABLE and incomprehensible. The context in which I live. The atmosphere around and within everything I grasp or love. The mystery which human beings call God—and even as a word, God is inescapable . The Word "God" We do not make our language. We are born into it. Much more does language make us what we are. It gives us the concepts with which we think. We contact things within language. It shapes the way in which we touch reality and allow it to touch us. It supplies the possibilities for communication, for reaching beyond ourselves into the lives of others. We exist with others through language. We possess our language together. Language constitutes a human openness. It frames the questions we consider and the answers we give. Deep in language, part of its initial and primitive tradition, is the word t4 God." Strange that we have such a word. Most things that we name, we encounter , come up against. Trees, chairs, rocks, human beings—these things we find about us, here and now. But God . . . ? Yet the word ranges through all our speech. Strange that it should be there. To name what we experience as mysterious beyond all naming. The word emerges in a thousand different moments. It can be trivialized in invective or invoked in prayer or produced for ceremonial rhetoric or come 31 32 A WORLD OF GRACE out of the deep silence of overwhelming crisis and death. The word exists and continues to mingle in language no matter how it is treasured or eroded. It is ineluctably there even for those who refuse it any reality beyond language. Even the atheist, the "godless," keeps the word alive—present and provocative. Does the word mean, or merely point out? You don't run up against God, but the word does function like a proper noun. It does not simply signal another individual within our experience, but somehow it does point out. And it does more. When you say "Yahweh is God," what are you saying? You are not saying nothing. Human beings have died for statements like this. We translate the word "God" from one language to another. It must, then, mean something. It both serves as a proper noun, and also carries meaning. What do you mean when you use "God"? The name only initially seems to say nothing about itself. If you pause over the word, weigh it, examine it for the experience which it contains and echoes, the word which seems faceless and without contour serves well to speak of the One who is not another thing, who is the nameless, silent context for everything we name. Think of it for a minute. "God" brings a new situation into serious speech. Everything else comes into a whole before it—everything else as a whole faces this word, whether persons, theaters , friendships, life or death. Each of these are "what is brought forth" or "what is created" or "what looks beyond itself." No matter how radically things differ among themselves, they stand over and against "God" as having this in common: They look to Him as origin or as goal or as the ocean out of which they came. The meaning of "God" is here: Everything regards Him or depends upon Him or comes out of Him. Everything faces Him. This is His meaning: "God" must make sense of everything else, must draw it into a unity. In this pervasive dependence upon Him, however differently explained, all things come into a community among themselves and the meaning of "God" is experienced. Thus the word names the One who mysteriously unifies everything and so is always present. "God" can summon up all of reality as its correlative. Everything becomes His "creation"; it stands over against and dependent upon Him; it only is because He is. The word names that which alone calls reality into a whole. Of course the word can remain overlooked and unheard, its depths wasted or unrealized, because "God" integrates the totality which is always present. If the word were to disappear, what else would bring us before the WITHIN...