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

11. The Hope for Humanity

11 The Hope for Humanity: Rahners Eschatology WILLIAM M. THOMPSON Traditional teaching on the ''four last things'' —death, judgment, heaven, hell—has been significantly reshaped by Rahners emphasis on the instinct for fulfillment in all human experience. This essay presents his interpretative principles, showing how they relate to his thought on Christ and humanity and also drawing out their practical implications for Christian life in the present. 1 remember hearing once from a New York psychoanalyst that after reading an essay I had written on the doctrine of hell, he could at last reconcile his scientific training with his religious faith. For him the notion of hell was the great stumbling block to faith. What the psychoanalyst did not know was that my study had been greatly influenced by Karl Rahner. Although Rahner has never done a sustained treatment of humanity 's ultimate destiny, individually and collectively, he has contributed brilliant essays on possible approaches to the subject, and it is here that his contribution lies. If you will, he has been most concerned with the conditions necessary if modern people are to make the ideas of eschatology their own. He seems very early in his career to have become aware of how difficult it is for modernity to give credence to the various doctrines that comprise Christianity's eschatological faith: the resurrection, beatific vision, purgatory, hell, heaven, the final judgment, the communion of saints, the bodily resurrection, the transfigurationof the world. Rahner has written in various places about some of the difficulties which we moderns have with beliefs about a final destiny. He points to 153 I 154 A WORLD OF GRACE our secular experience of the world today. It is an experience of the world as "worldly," as finite and human, and thus apparently the result of inner-worldly causes and human planning. No doubt, our modern consciousness of planning our own future implies a certain eschatological aspiration: We experience ourselves as hoping beings, as goal-directed. Yet this is a secularized eschatology, and it is no longer immediately evident how this can be reconciled with the Christian belief in an afterlife which transcends human self-making and is the gift of God. Allied with this is the problem of demythologization, which becomes even more urgent in the area of eschatology. It would seem that the traditional afterlife statements of Holy Scripture and tradition are particularly prone to the colorful imagery characteristic of mythology. However one might try to explain this abundance of mythological imagery, Rahner is acutely aware that people today cannot easily assent to statements which seem to have no anchoring in empirical human experience. As we will see, his unique contribution to eschatology probably lies here, in his attempt to probe how, given our moorings in the present, we can speak at all of the "last things," the absolute and final future. Finally, there is the fact that in the history of theological reflection, eschatology has undergone a kind of privatization and interiorization. Instead of being a proclamation about the hope for the world and humanity as a whole—and thus something relevant to society at large—it has become strangely reduced to a proclamation about the individual's private destiny. Attention was concentrated upon the immortality of the individual soul, and the cosmic and social perspectives of scripture were lost from sight. One might look to the growing individualism of the western mind as a partial explanation for this privatization of eschatology . A further factor might be the historic tendency of Christianity towards a dualism in which earthly society is devalued in the face of the supernatural. Every religion which believes in a supramundane revelation runs the danger of denigrating the mundane. The earth and our linkage with it through body and social responsibility are replaced in the Christian imagination by a fascination for eternity and our linkage with it through "soul." But for our contemporaries this means that eschatology all too easily becomes an otherwordly Utopia and opiate for the people, fostering a kind of indifference to the misery of this world. Rahner is aware of this, and some of his finest work has been concerned precisely to show how a properly understood eschatology should rather foster a healthy but critical worldly secularity and social involvement. THE HOPE FOR HUMANITY: RAHNERS ESCHATOLOGY 755 Preliminaries to Rahner's Eschatology Perhaps the most basic insight to be considered is this: Eschatology is not...