A World of Grace/Karl Rahner:

...Anne Carr then begins where Rahner himself does, probing our experience of ourselves as persons driven by an itch to know, responsible for what we make of ourselves, seeking our wholeness in the concrete world of time, history, and society...

...When the book appeared, Leo O'Donovan addressed a theological convention on "how to Teach Rahner's Foundations...

...William Dych provides an overall orientation by explaining why Rahner raises the questions he does and how he goes about answering them...

...At die same time the book gains liveliness from its collaborative authorship...

...Certainly it almost begs for adoption in the undergraduate classroom, especially at a time when even university departments of theology or religious studies are hearing the clamor of "Back to basics...

...Another manages to insinuate a hint of critical reserve into the questions for discussion with which each essay concludes...

...KABL RAHMER AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS THEOLOGY Karl-Heinz Weger Seabury, $8.95, 200 pp...

...The thought remains constantly faithful to Rahner, but the voices, or teaching styles, differ markedly...

...Rahner's basic intuition is simple and hardly novel...

...One writer, finds his wholehearted enthusiasm impossible to conceal as exclamation points leap irrepressibly from the page...

...Congar and Rahner, on the other hand, have labored mightily to negotiate the flood tide of more immediate questions released by the Catholic world's groping engagement with the twentieth century...

...A World of Grace enables the reader to enter Rahner's vision and begin thinking along with him...

...Now, with A World of Grace, O'Donovan offers the other side of the coin...

...Michael Fahey takes up a grab-bag of questions about the church, ranging from the issue of its foundation by Jesus to the necessity of belonging to a particular denomination...

...Otto Hentz then secures the universal significance of that confession by showing its correspondence to humanity's search within history for an absolute event of salvation...

...17) ranks as one of the theological bloopers of the century...

...Too often the words are reproduced, but their sense seems garbled or lost...

...grasped in some fashion in the religions of mankind, it finds definitive expression in Christ...

...John Galvin clarifies the Christian insight that our experience of being called to a fullness of knowledge and love is, in fact, an experience of the gracious self-offer that God makes to all...

...These opening chapters lay out the ingredients of the philosophical underpinnings that Rahner established with his "transcendental anthropology" (the book includes a helpful glossary for terms like this...

...Like many recent European books, Weger's suffers from a woodenly literal translation...

...Thomas O'Meara shows that this gracious offer has a history as long as that of the race...

...They can look back with pride on the documents of the Second Vatican Council which in many passages bear their imprint...

...The remaining essays shift to a more explicitly theological perspective...

...to intimate its truth under the intellectual conditions of a culture shaped by Kant and Hegel, by Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, is quite a different matter...

...The first three chapters are crucial...

...Unwary readers, then, are best steered away from the book...

...its best use lies in a formal academic setting.mal academic setting...

...Brian McDermott reflects on original sin as the dark possibility we harbor of radically dehumanizing ourselves in self-chosen isolation...

...Sheer volume alone might daunt a prospective reader...

...Patiently assembled over many years, abstrusely concentrated on methodological issues, summed up in just two major books, its impact lies still largely in the future...

...These questions, together with the suggestions for further reading which accompany them, open up any number of uses for the book...

...In any comparison among them Lonergan's work most resembles a time bomb...

...William P. Leewe 1979, A YEAR of birthday festivities for theologians, saw Yves Congar, Bernard Lonergan, and Karl Rahner turn seventy-five...

...Karl-Heinz Weger's book offers a serviceable introduction to roughly the same material...

...Only once, in dealing with Rahner's notion of the "anonymous Christian," does it depart from exposition to answer Rahner's critics at some length...

...If at points the essays repeat one another, this is a strength, for in their cumulative impact they succeed in evoking Rahner's manner of initiating us into the experience of God...

...The general tone is noticeably more technical, and at times the prose becomes as dense as anything by Rahner himself...

...At moments the familiar teacher's quandary emerges-stay with your audience, or hurry to cover the material...

...Taking the order of its topics from Foundations, A World of Grace represents a collaborative effort by O'Donovan and the twelve other American scholars whose essays make up the book...

...All three have responded to the common task imposed on their generation of liberating Catholic theology from the neoscholastic straitjacket with which their predecessors thought to preserve and defend the faith...

...The two books here under review seek to meet that need...

...By one recent tally Rahner's bibliography mounts to some thirty-five hundred items...

...The story goes round, however, that Rahner's elder brother Hugo, also a Jesuit, planned to spend his retirement translating Karl's writings-into German...

...Students of Rahner will find Weger's summaries helpful, but the book does not enjoy the same broad appeal as A World of Grace...

...Ironically, then, most of us will need some sort of bridge to gain access to the thought of this master builder of bridges between the Catholic tradition and contemporary culture...

...John Carmody sets sacramental life within the broader context of an integral humanism, and William Thompson finds in our present experience the key to interpreting doctrines on our ultimate destiny...

...It has spawned as well a thriving cottage industry in secondary literature...

...And to use this simple insight as the key that unlocks and makes sense of the variegated body of Catholic doctrine adds a further dimension to the task...

...Essays of earnest, sober exposition give way to exercises of delightfully imaginative appeal...

...A few years ago Rahner published a work entitled Foundations of Christian Faith which comes as close as anything he has written to summing up his thought...

...But to believe this is one thing...

...To assert, for example, that according to Rahner ". . . we have to disregard the fundamental change that has taken place in man's world-view from the cbsmocen-tric attitude of the ancient world and the Middle Ages to the anthropocentricity of the modern era" (p...

...J. Peter Schineller focuses on the historical side of Christol-ogy, seeking to reenact the path which led the first disciples from an encounter with a Jewish reformer to confession of the risen One as God's Christ...

...Paragraphs of monumental length, generously dosed with technical terms from the scholastic repertoire and enveloped in a thick, Heideggerian atmosphere, give the story its point...

...Brevity and clear, direct prose make these essays a success...

...At points, too, the author has been betrayed by either his German editor or the English translator...

...James Bresnahan, finally, shows how Rahner's understanding of human freedom implies a revision of the natural-law thinking prevalent in Catholic moral theology...

...As Augustine put it centuries before, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves...

...All this activity, the stuff of our everyday lives, implies and heads toward an ever-receding, infinitely full horizon and, as Michel Buckley goes on to suggest, the presence of that horizon provides an inevitable, if often unnoticed, experience of the holy mystery to which our word "God'' seeks to point...