All is grace
Tracy, David
. . . . . . . . I III I I Karl Rahner, S.J. 'ALL IS GRACE' A ROOTED RADICAL S INCE Karl Rahner' s death on March 30, many of us have been stunned by the recognition of how much we all...
...Then, exit Cicero, and enter pure Rahner: the question he would ask...
...And as the work progressed a Curious sea change took place...
...In Karl Rahner, thinking became a religious experience...
...His prose, which many affected to find so tortuous, had a power and attraction peculiar to itself...
...Rahner knew Thomas Aquinas as well as the Thomists did...
...He always seemed to begin with a rhetoric reminiscent of Cicero: all the questions he would not ask, could not ask, had no time now to ask, hoped to know enough some day to be able to ask properly...
...The brooding Rahnerian prose, that undertone, at once mystical and strangely ironic, even melancholic, the refusal of any easy comprehensibility, the surprising bluntness of his occasional concrete advice, the ability to face what we call reality and still be able to think, the willingness to pose a fundamental question rather than add yet another answer to the cluttered list -- all these peculiarly Rahnerian motifs conspired to make a struggling reader willing to suspend the usual disbelief and find plausible the startling thought, "All is grace...
...There are only four or five thinkers in the rich tradition of Catholic .theology of whom it can be said: after that work, nothing can be the same again...
...DAVID TRACY (Father David Tracy, associate professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, is the author of Blessed Rage for Order and The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, both published by Crossroad Books...
...Even those who could never quite follow the labyrinthine sentences and complex abstractions of his thought sensed that something important was at stake here, something worthwhile, something which would last...
...But he also knew some other realities that most Catholic theologians of his youth had long since for~;otten: Augustine, the mystics, the promise and threat of modernity, the difference between thinking and problemsolving, the power of theological questioning as an existential quest...
...He also knew how much we can understand if we would stop clinging to our pathetic certainties and our brittle answers...
...So many unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, questions...
...Yes, he was a major influence on Vatican II and on much of the best that has happened in the church since then...
...Through those questions and under the pressure of that quest, mysteries, problems, and doctrines yielded a suddenly felt sense of radical mystery: the mystery we are finally to ourselves, we are before one another, before history and cosmos, above all before God...
...what is grace...
...Through all these questions, the religious quest of Karl Rahner became imprinted on the Catholic landscape...
...More recently, there are many Protestant theologians who feel the same impact...
...Karl Rahner was rooted in the Catholic tradition in all its plurality and power...
...And so he was...
...Then there is his influence...
...The "later" Rahner insisted he knew less and less than he thought he knew at the beginning...
...All its grace," he insisted over and over again...
...He was, everyone says, a "theologian's theologian...
...who is God...
...what does it mean to speak the word mystery...
...God's reality became more incomprehensible the more comprehensible our best thoughts about God became...
...Thatquestion inevitably turned out to be one of the central questions we wanted to ask all along: what can we know...
...There is a restless, even driven, quality to a Rahner essay which forces the reader to think...
...Indeed, Karl Rahner was the most influential Catholic thinker since Newman...
...Before any too easy answer could emerge, the paradoxes, the aporias, and the questions returned...
...May he rest in peace...
...Yet reflection on the reality of Jesus Christ did not dissolve but intensified that sense of radical mystery...
...And knowing this, he knew how little we know...
...The questions multiplied and intensified to render theology a religious quest, worthy of a lifetime of effort...
...Yet somehow Rahner found a religious-theological way which was honest, courageous, and believable...
...Karl Rahner was one of those few...
...He knew and loved the classic doctrines of the tradition...
...He was as restless as the rest of us in this incredible cent, ury...
...Commonweal: 230...
...There is probably no Catholic theologian writing today anywhere in the world who does not bear Rahner's imprint...
...He knew the old manuals so well that he exploded their once-overpowering influence forever...
...Then we might learn to think, to let go into radical mystery, to yield to what Rahner did not hesitate to name the radical skepticism of the Christian: the deepening knowledge that all is mystery, the unexpected trust that all is grace...
...For no serious reader could miss that here, for once, theology preached no cheap grace, no fatuous optimism...
...He knew that God is God and that we are not...
...Yet Karl Rahner was something more...
...what can we hope for...
...Optimism and pessimism, he knew, are natural vices...
...We were blessed tohave him among us...
...Part of what stuns us is, of course, his extraordinary energy and output: over four thousand articles and books on every conceivable subject ranging from Chalcedon to the Beaties and to the grace of everyday life...
...In Rahner this unlikely response, this surprising faith became believable...
...ALL IS GRACE' A ROOTED RADICAL S INCE Karl Rahner' s death on March 30, many of us have been stunned by the recognition of how much we all owe him...
...who is this Jesus ChriSt...
...And we became more and more incomprehensible to ourselves the more we learned of ourselves...
...who, then, in the light of this radical mystery of Jesus Christ are we, who is God, what is real...
...Our onceclear answers dissolved into unnerving questions...
...In that context, Jesus Christ was the event of disclosure, the decisive manifestation of both God and ourselves...
...who are we...
...hope is a theological .virtue...
Vol. 111 • April 1984 • No. 8
