Placing Sin in Karl Rahner’s Theology

Ho-Tsui on Rahner and Sin

Ho-Tsui’s book has four parts: an introduction, a chapter tracing the development of Rahner’s teaching on sin through his works, a chapter treating the same works under systematic theological categories, and a final, evaluative chapter. From the start, Ho-Tsui acknowledges that the academy, society, and perhaps even the church are stacked against her project: ‘It is becoming ever more difficult in theology to address and to communicate about the central Christian concepts of sin and guilt.’ ¹¹ She cites Jesuit theologian Michael Sievernich’s threefold breakdown of the grounds for this difficulty. ¹² Narrow and false preaching about ecclesial practice of penance and sin and guilt more generally, 19th-century critiques of Christian morality, and inquiry from the human sciences into the conditioning factors of human decision-making and behavior contribute to waning concern with sin. Nevertheless, Christian theologians remain committed to making this pivotal tenet of the Christian message intelligible. For Ho-Tsui, Rahner’s renown as a ‘resource theologian’ qualifies him for being consulted on sin. ¹³ This consultation proves difficult, though, since Rahner rarely treats sin and guilt directly in his works, opting instead to handle them under the auspices of other themes. ¹⁴ Again Ho-Tsui takes her inspiration from Sievernich, suggesting that Rahner never developed a systematic theology of sin, so it must be worked out from his entire oeuvre. ¹⁵

The second chapter patiently and pithily traces the chronological development of Rahner’s thinking on sin. Ho-Tsui joins several Rahner scholars, including Karl H. Neufeld, Marlies Mügge, Paul Rulands, and Dorothea Sattler, in pointing out that Rahner commences and closes his scholarly career with studies of penance. ¹⁶ She briefly explicates Rahner’s early systematic study ‘The Meaning of Frequent Confession of Devotion’ (1934) and his first published historical study ‘Sin as Loss of Grace in Early Christian Literature’ (1936). ¹⁷ Then she states, ‘The image of the human person as sinner comes into view … right at the beginning of Rahner’s theology, and this occurs in a sacramental, ecclesial, and Christological context.’ ¹⁸ Near the chapter’s end, Ho-Tsui shows how these early studies are bookended by a 1982 chapter on guilt, forgiveness, and conversion. ¹⁹ Although it does not foreground the sacramental-ecclesial dimension of sin and conversion, the study does consider the forgiving word of God made present by the church. ²⁰ Sin and conversion occupy Rahner’s interest for his whole career.

Ho-Tsui exhaustively considers the many signposts between Rahner’s first and last writings. A few works are marked as especially significant: ‘Guilt and Forgiveness of Guilt as the Border Area between Theology and Psychotherapy’ (1953), ‘The Comfort of Time’ (1956), ‘Guilt–Responsibility–Punishment in the View of Catholic Theology’ (1964), The Practice of Priestly Existence (1970), and ‘Is Guilt Trivialized in Traditional Theology?’ (1972). ²¹

She identifies the 1953 article as ‘the first systematic work and one of the few key works of Rahner’s that directly dealt with the topics of sin and guilt.’ ²² It presents crucial distinctions that prove important for Rahner’s future works on sin: between sin as act and sinfulness as condition; the originary (ursprüngliche) person, objectifications of this person, and the definitive (endgültige) person; and sinful acts and the suffering that results from and accompanies them. ‘The Comfort of Time,’ an essay on ‘merit’ and salvation, adds the idea that good and evil are distinguished not as garnering ‘more’ or ‘less’ merit, but as expressing a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God. The basic decision of life (die Grundentscheidung des Lebens), which is made at the level of the originary person, lies in an ‘absolute yes or absolute no toward God.’ ²³

The ‘Guilt–Responsibility–Punishment’ piece presents what Ho-Tsui calls a ‘core thesis (Kernthese) of [Rahner’s] teaching on sin’: ‘Man disposes himself before God and toward or away from God with the totality of his essence and existence, such that this temporal disposal constitutes the eternal definitiveness of his existence in absolute salvation or damnation: man is through his freedom responsible for his eternal salvation or damnation.’ ²⁴ This is Rahner’s classic formulation of the fundamental option.

Another core thesis appears in a set of spiritual conferences on the priesthood. It augments Rahner’s teaching on the fundamental option while, notably, drawing a connection between this teaching and the first week of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. As a definitive ‘no’ to God, sin ‘is a mystery. One cannot in the final analysis conceive of how the creature can sin, [the creature] who proceeds from God’s hand and from God only, in whom no element is included that would not witness to the goodness and holiness of God.’ Nevertheless, Rahner continues, scripture tells us that this sin is real—‘an actual no to God, which is something other than the inevitable imperfection of the finite creature [or] a mere transitional phase of development.’ ²⁵ Ho-Tsui sums up this insight: ‘One cannot comprehend sin, but only beg for help and forgiveness.’ ²⁶

‘Is Guilt Trivialized in Traditional Theology?’ (‘Verharmlosung der Schuld in der traditionellen Theologie?’) sets up a fictive Scholastic plea against theological anxiety over guilt. ²⁷ Each proposition explains away guilt as a misapprehension of freedom’s will toward the good, or as a fleeting part of a grand divine design. For Rahner, the school-theology approach to guilt raises as many questions as it solves, even if it aims for resolution. He offers an alternative, focusing less on resolution than the irresolvability of two basic human experiences: ‘of being threatened at one’s most interior point by sin’ (der innersten Bedrohtheit durch die Sünde) and ‘of the hope for a reality (called God and God’s grace) that can and will remove the possibility and actuality of guilt.’ ²⁸ These experiences may not be resolved theoretically, but may be considered together from the standpoint of praxis. They roughly correspond to the two sides of the fundamental option. Rahner enjoins theologians of guilt to reflect on this basic decision (Grundentscheidung). They may find that in order to ward off the suspicion that it trivializes guilt, theology should—somewhat paradoxically—reflect on the hope of forgiveness. ²⁹ This seems to be Rahner’s attempt to inoculate himself against the charge of Verharmlosung.

The third chapter places sin in Rahner’s corpus using seven systematic-theological themes: (1) transcendental anthropology, (2) grace, (3) Christology, (4) freedom, (5) ‘man as radically threatened by guilt,’ (6) original sin, and (7) originary experience of guilt and sin. While many of these themes overlap significantly, Ho-Tsui sounds out the nuances between them. Rahner’s philosophical works reveal that sin ‘opposes what is essential, thus what ought to be and is binding, for transcendence,’ because actual freedom is transcendence toward God. ³⁰ Rahner’s revision of post-Tridentine theology of grace, restructuring it in terms of God’s universal salvific will in Christ, locates sin within a dialogical structure, where the human person refuses to act as God’s partner. ³¹ The human person’s relation to God is revealed fully in Christ; God’s self-gift in Christ is reversed in human sin. ³² Thus sin consists, properly speaking, in unfreedom. ³³ But this is not to say that sin as a ‘no’ to God cannot occur. The radical threat of guilt consists in this: such a ‘no’ can be pronounced, in the depths of the human person, to God—not just to God’s Law, but to God’s self. ³⁴ Original sin and attendant topics like concupiscence complexify Rahner’s theology of freedom and guilt by giving him occasion to articulate the material conditions for free decision. ³⁵ Finally, Rahner’s placement of sin and guilt within the originary stratum of human experience reinforces his insistence that sin is a mystery. ³⁶ This sevenfold systematic treatment of Rahner on sin amplifies chapter two’s accomplishments.

The fourth chapter provides a summary of Ho-Tsui’s findings, an apologia for Rahner’s attempt to make the doctrine of sin understandable to contemporary people (Rahner’s ecumenical and scientific interests are foregrounded here), an evaluation in light of preeminent critiques of Rahner, and concluding critical questions. The chapter is dominated by Ho-Tsui’s engagement with three major critics of Rahner: Hans Urs von Balthasar, Johann Baptist Metz, and Joseph Ratzinger. These three critics raise objections that Rahner (1) trivializes sin and loses sight of the Cross of Christ as the one true expiation of sin (Balthasar), ³⁷ (2) unduly downplays the socio-historical dimension of sin (Metz), ³⁸ and (3) overestimates the self’s freedom in sin (Ratzinger). ³⁹ Tying these counts together is the charge that Rahner misapprehends history: he is too optimistic about salvation history, he privatizes history, or he overindulges in a German Idealist view of freedom that surpasses worldly history. ⁴⁰ For Ho-Tsui herself, Rahner’s historical positioning of the Cross is the weak point of his theology of sin. ⁴¹ She objects to Rahner’s understanding of Christ’s ‘representation’ of sinners on the Cross as solidarity with sinners rather than atonement for the sins of the world. This understanding attenuates the idea of vicarious representation to the point that the radicality of sin becomes difficult to understand, as does the radical forgiveness offered on the Cross (and, by extension, through the church). ⁴² Does Christ really overcome the sins of the world, or does he simply stand alongside sinners? Another potential problem relates to this issue of representation. Rahner’s revision of representation in terms of Christ’s Incarnation—where Christ represents the highest case of God’s self-communication through grace to humanity—makes it hard for him to account for how a radical ‘no’ to God could be possible. Jesus Christ has pronounced the definitive ‘yes’ to God, thus, presumably, determining human history in the direction of this ‘yes.’ How, then, can Rahner teach that the human person is free to say ‘no’? Ho-Tsui ends the book on a note of mystery: perhaps these apparent insufficiencies in Rahner’s point to the insolubility of the doctrine of sin.

This survey of Ho-Tsui’s book has outlined some strategies for placing sin in Rahner’s theology: identifying relevant texts, setting parameters for systematically treating the major ideas of these texts, and addressing serious objections to Rahner’s thoughts on sin (or to the inertia of his other theological positions, which have implications for a theology of sin). The next two parts push further along this path, by suggesting that another portion of Rahner’s corpus receive attention (his penance studies), and that his theology of the fundamental option be given even closer scrutiny. The questions with which Ho-Tsui closes her text will drive our inquiry. In summary, how does Rahner’s theology account for radical mercy in response to real sin?

Penance: Sin and Ecclesial Mercy

Rahner’s studies on penance have not received much attention. ⁴³ But Dorothea Sattler points out that the marginalization of the theology of penance does not make complete sense. ‘At present,’ Sattler states, ‘the theology of penance leads a rather shadowy existence, despite, in comparison with the time during which Rahner taught, an overwhelmingly heightened awareness of the abysses of human sin.’ ⁴⁴ While one might quibble that mid-20th-century Catholics were anything but incognizant of their sinfulness, Sattler is correct that advances in critical theory, psychoanalysis, feminist and critical race theories, and various other social theories related to social exclusion and violence have foregrounded the devastation visited upon the world by human wickedness. And theology, of course, has made important contributions in this vein, with many liberationist theologies. Even so, the theology of penance, which should be an obvious resource for theological thinking about sin and evil, has hardly been accessed.

Sattler continues, proposing why this might be the case: ‘Two movements appear to be simultaneous: the growing societal attentiveness to the necessity of a conversation about the phenomenon of evil and its aftereffects, and the still persistent skepticism over whether the church is the place where the things pertinent to this question are to be spoken of.’ ⁴⁵ This skepticism is long-standing, dating back to the 18th century at least. It has become especially entrenched over the past two decades in places like the USA and Ireland where sex abuse crises have deeply shaken people’s confidence in the credibility of the church with regard to sin. In the realm of theory, Michel Foucault is symptomatic of broad cultural skepticism toward penance. ⁴⁶ For him, penance is important only insofar as it presages modern instruments of control like prisons. Foucault is the late modern critical theorist who comes closest to negotiating with penance—and it is noteworthy that he focuses on virtually the same historical material Rahner does—but he refuses to see the positive dimension of it. The same goes for secular culture generally.

This is not to dismiss secular concerns. Sattler avers that theology owes an answer to people who inquire, ‘What “added value” over and above an act of existential reconciliation in the interpersonal realm will it have for a person if this event is considered and celebrated before the face of God in an ecclesial context?’ ⁴⁷ Rahner’s penance studies address precisely this question, even if they meet it obliquely through historical investigation. Even more importantly for our purposes, the penance studies reframe theological thinking on sin. Rather than seeing sin primarily in terms of individual indiscretion, sin must be seen foremost with regard to the church’s proper, twofold task: rejecting sin yet welcoming back sinners. The penance studies concern mercy. They aim to recall the Catholic Church to its mission of mercy in contradistinction to the tendency, to use later terminology from Pope Francis, to use the confessional as a ‘torture chamber.’ ⁴⁸ The ‘added value’ of penance, qua ecclesial activity, is—or should be—its signification of God’s boundless mercy.

As we saw with Ho-Tsui, two of Rahner’s first scholarly publications were on frequent confession (1934) and sin as the loss of grace in early church penitential theology and practice (1936). He began lecturing on penance in the aftermath of World War II at Pullach (1945), and would repeat this lecture course at least three times until 1960. Though his teaching responsibilities changed in the early 1960s at Munich and then at Münster, he remained interested in penance and engaged in scholarly debates on the subject. Rahner’s post-conciliar work hardly highlights sin, but it does not downplay it quite to the extent that is commonly believed. In fact, some of Rahner’s most spirited writing immediately after the council and up to his death concerned sin, penance, and related matters. ‘Penance as an Additional Act of Reconciliation with the Church’ (1967) comments favorably on the references to penance in the council documents, which are few but no less significant. ⁴⁹ Lest this seem to be a passing interest of Rahner’s, he invokes the same references in a 1982 lecture, ‘Forgotten Dogmatic Initiatives of the Second Vatican Council.’ ⁵⁰ There he regrets that the council’s thinking on penance has not yet been adequately elaborated. And not to be ignored is Schriften zur Theologie 11 (1973), in which Rahner collects and republishes studies on the history of penance that occupied him from 1936 through the 1950s. ⁵¹ While it is true that Karl Neufeld played an instrumental role in editing these pieces, nevertheless Rahner’s preface indicates his keen interest in the work’s publication. Most significantly, he contests critiques of his theology as ‘speculative’ and unconcerned with history. ⁵² Similar critiques dismiss him as too philosophical, too optimistic, too anthropological and, in all these connections, not concerned enough with sin. Other works on penance, indulgences, and the sinful church complement Rahner’s sin-related offerings after Vatican II. ⁵³

Here I shall focus on just one essay, though a programmatic and vitally important one: ‘Forgotten Truths about the Sacrament of Penance’ (1953). ⁵⁴ This article discusses five truths that the theological and liturgical tradition has misremembered, or outright lost. I shall treat four of them, which pertain directly to the article’s main contribution: Rahner’s recovery of an ecclesial, as opposed to individualistic, understanding of sin. Though this is a pre-conciliar document, its argument coheres well with Rahner’s post-conciliar ecclesiology, with its rejection of individualist privatism. ⁵⁵

Rahner underscores that the development of the penitential tradition led to a misperception that sin is between the individual (me) and God. ⁵⁶ Close study of the sacrament of penance in the early church reveals that sin is viewed as not only an individual offense against God’s will, but ‘an offense against the holy communion of the redeemed, which is the Church.’ ⁵⁷ This is the first forgotten truth. Rahner remarks,

It has been said that the man of today is almost incapable of the thought of being happy or of reaching heaven without bearing his neighbor and his fate along with him—that he does not wish for any happiness if it does not also include that of others. If this is so, then it ought to lie heavily on our soul that we have been guilty of offenses against our neighbor, even if only in our most secret thoughts, and that to some extent the field of our disloyalty and of our failure is spread over the whole Church (and beyond her). No one lives for himself alone. And so no one sins for himself alone. In the darkness of the world, in its stifling sinfulness, in the mental indolence of the Church of which we complain so often—as if we did not bear any responsibility for it—our own guilt looks us in the face. ⁵⁸

Contemporary Christians must live up to their best intentions, to repudiate self-centeredness, and to embrace a communitarian outlook with respect to their failings and guilt.

True opposition to sin occurs in penance, when one accuses oneself of guilt before the Church. One acknowledges one’s failing to the community, and requests the community’s support for one’s repentance. Hence the fourth forgotten truth: the sin of a member of the church is borne by the church, and the intercessory prayer of the church prepares for the conversion from sin that penance effects. ⁵⁹ In early Christian authors like Tertullian, Ambrose, and Augustine, the priest’s (or bishop’s) words of absolution belong to the wider activity of the intercessory prayer of the church community on behalf of the penitent. ⁶⁰ Again, sin is a communal affair.

The second and fifth forgotten truths relate to ecclesial authority. They bear on the central scriptural texts for Rahner’s writings on penance: Mt 16:18 and 18:18, Jesus’ statements regarding Peter as the rock on which the church is built, and on the apostolic responsibility for ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ sins. ⁶¹ The church has authority to reject and to forgive sin. The church thus participates in Christ’s prerogative as judge. ⁶²

The second forgotten truth may not seem to have been forgotten at all. Modern Catholicism heavily emphasizes the church’s authority to impose bans up to and including excommunication. But Rahner intimates that the modern focus is misplaced. It obscures the fundamental meaning of the church’s ‘binding’ of sin as ‘the connatural reaction of the Church to the grave sin of her member.’ ⁶³ In the early church, external penalties imposed on a penitent were believed to derive from the intimate relationship between the church and each of her members. With a relational model for penitential theology developed from his studies of the early church, Rahner opposes the dominant modern model, which regards penance primarily in transactional or juridical terms. ⁶⁴ Penance should be seen as a sacrament of the living caritas of the church, which ‘must not be understood . . . as the merely subjective disposition, or merely as the individualistically conceived ‘infused’ virtuous habit, but as the divine love which pours forth continuously in our direction from the Church.’ ⁶⁵ The sinner breaks the ecclesial bond of love, which the church must restore through forgiveness. ⁶⁶ The fifth truth is that when the church lifts its ban from the sinner, this ‘loosing’ applies not only to the sinner’s stance vis-à-vis the Church, but also with respect to God: ‘The Church grants the sinner peace with God in granting him the gift of her peace and by once more according him her spiritual love in an authoritative manner.’ ⁶⁷ Overcoming sin involves not merely an individual’s reconciliation with God, but also necessarily reconciliation with the church, a return to the community ‘as someone healed.’ ⁶⁸

Sattler can help us summarize how Rahner defines sin within its ecclesial matrix. She identifies two major themes in his penitential writings: (1) ‘the ecclesial dimension of penance in the form of the public procedures of excommunication and reconciliation,’ and (2) ‘the relation between the official-ecclesial character of penance and its preconditions and consequences in a converted life.’ ⁶⁹ These themes imply several teachings about sin. It is neither perpetrated nor remitted by a lone individual. It affects communities. It demands communal rejection. Conversion from sin entails communal forgiveness. Sin is best perceived, then, against the background of ecclesial mercy.

‘No’ to God: The Necessity of Ecclesial Mercy

Rahner’s retrieval of an ecclesial-communal view of sacramental forgiveness brings us to the 1953 article that Ho-Tsui deems essential for understanding Rahner’s teachings on sin: ‘Guilt and Forgiveness of Guilt as the Border Area between Theology and Psychotherapy.’ ⁷⁰ The article’s main interest is the relationship between ecclesial and psychotherapeutic responses to guilt. Rahner insists upon a strict difference between the forgiveness of guilt in the church (its theology, sacraments, and preaching) and the treatment of guilty psychological states in psychotherapy. ⁷¹ This Auseinandersetzung between theology and psychotherapy allows him to demonstrate that in order truly to understand human guilt—and by extension the human person—one needs theology. Only through theological inquiry can one tap into the innermost ground of human guilt, because strictly speaking ‘there can be guilt only when one knowingly has sinned against God,’ ⁷² and sin is a theological, not a psychological category.

Rahner’s development of his theological reading of guilt begins with the following point: ‘For theology and according to revelation, guilt and sin are first and at their origin acts [or] events, not states.’ ⁷³ This reduction of guilt and sin to action may seem to indicate that sins are merely outward phenomena that could be assessed easily by psychological or other positive scientific methods. But Rahner soon refines the definition of ‘act’ into the ‘freely accomplished attitude and condition’ that constitutes the ‘Personkern’ or ‘core of the person.’ ⁷⁴ The true act of freedom occurs within the human person, prior to individual temporal acts. ‘Prior’ is not intended here in the chronological sense, but in the metaphysical sense. The free act in the Personkern represents the condition for all individual acts. This becomes clear when Rahner maintains that ‘the tangible offense against a person’s nature’ that occurs in an individual temporal act of sin ‘is the constitutive sign’ of a deeper revolt against God ‘in the depth of the spirit.’ ⁷⁵ From this point forward, Rahner refers to the ‘originary act of freedom (der ursprünglichen Freiheitstat)’ or the ‘originary person.’ ⁷⁶ ‘Originary’ refers to the innermost dimension of the person.

Two allusions to ‘the German mystics’ suggest that Rahner develops his idea of the ‘originary person’ from spiritual guides like Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–61), of whom Rahner was fond. ⁷⁷ The ‘German mystics’ give Rahner language to describe personal integration, where the originary person achieves finality through a worldly mediator (the body). ⁷⁸ In turn, Rahner can align sin with disintegration of the person, where the constitutive physical sign of sin is ‘suffering.’ ⁷⁹ Rahner does not argue that all suffering necessarily signifies personal guilt, but that this guilt, which arises from the originary ground, often manifests itself as physical suffering.

The article on guilt concludes by stipulating the key difference in tasks between the psychotherapist and the priest. The psychotherapist (Rahner has ‘physician,’ or ‘Arzt’) treats outward manifestations of the originary person’s guilt. Even if her work touches upon the psyche, it ‘does not directly reach the nonobjective, personal ground of spiritual freedom as such, where man is called immediately by God and answers him with a “yes” or a “no.”’ ⁸⁰ The priest, however, does not treat the outward manifestations of sin, like bodily suffering, but he mediates the forgiving word of God to the ‘originary person.’ ⁸¹ Through the sacrament of penance, the priest offers deep healing to the deepest stratum of the human person.

While Ho-Tsui flags this as an important article and indicates that certain dimensions of Rahner’s thinking on sin emerge first here, she could have made even more of it. When Rahner locates sin in the originary person, he identifies the radical dimension of sin. Instead of being merely epiphenomenal, or a temporary indiscretion, sin proves constitutive of the ground of a person’s existence. ⁸² The precariousness of sin necessitates the mercy of God, offered sacramentally through the church. This-worldly compassion (e.g., the kind offered by a psychotherapist) may be able to remedy the results of personal indiscretions. But more radical ecclesial mercy is needed to heal the originary person.

While my reading of this article on guilt and forgiveness suggests that Rahner’s location of sin at the level of the originary person has a theological advantage—it helps theology recover a sense of the need for ecclesial mercy—commentators have argued that Rahner’s view of freedom proves too unwieldy to be advantageous. Ron Highfield has been influential in this respect. Ho-Tsui, for example, draws on him for some of her most critical questions toward Rahner. ⁸³ Highfield dismisses Rahner’s theology of the fundamental option—the originary ‘yes’ or ‘no’—as conceptually incoherent and morally unhelpful. ⁸⁴ His ‘The Freedom to Say “No”: Karl Rahner’s Doctrine of Sin’ (1995) must be applauded because of its pioneering consideration of Rahner’s theology of sin. It interrogates Rahner by charging that he allows the human person a ‘divine-like freedom’ against which theologians must object, because ‘no being other than God can be thought to decide about God freely and definitively.’ ⁸⁵ Rahner’s insistence that freedom consummates in a fundamental option that must be a complete ‘yes’ or a complete ‘no’ to God mires him in inescapable conceptual difficulties. Though Highfield’s article treats Rahner’s theology of sin with a sophistication that other commentators deny it, he does not reach full success. Tacit assumptions about Rahner lead him astray.

A case in point is Highfield’s attempted explication of the basic tenet of Rahner’s theology of sin: ‘Human freedom is so radical and comprehensive … that it makes even God an object of choice, a choice which brings the human being to a definitive completion as a “yes” or “no” to God.’ ⁸⁶ In fact, this statement summarizes a view that Rahner rejects. In ‘The Theology of Freedom,’ the article Highfield is expositing, Rahner contends, ‘It would be a complete misconception of the nature of freedom to try to understand it as the mere capacity of choice between objects given a posteriori, among which, besides many others, there is also God.’ ⁸⁷ God is not posited as an object when one decides in freedom for or against God. Hence Rahner’s bracketing of the word ‘object’ when, for lack of a better lexical alternative, he must use the word as a placeholder for God as the goal of transcendence. ⁸⁸ Rahner does not propose that freedom objectifies God. Highfield is unable to substantiate the assumption that Rahner does. ⁸⁹ Highfield’s main accusation—that Rahner’s view of sin as a decisive ‘no’ toward God proves incoherent—is imperiled almost from the start. But we must continue examining his essay so as to answer his vigorous challenge.

Highfield asks whether Rahner assigns equal standing to the ‘yes’ that leads to salvation and the ‘no’ that heralds damnation. ⁹⁰ The answer, Highfield asserts, depends upon the context. In some places, Rahner gives ‘yes’ and ‘no’ equal weight, and in others, he feels forced ‘to hedge’ this equality. ⁹¹ This hedging results from the instability of a position holding that the creature’s freedom can outmatch the Creator’s. Rahner either unduly allows slippage between the transcendental valence of the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and the categorial valence that derives from it, or he posits a difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ so as to evade theological difficulties. ⁹² The ‘yes’ is never really an issue, because it fully accords with God’s will, whatever the case. But Rahner must abandon an absolute ‘no,’ lest divine absolute freedom and human absolute freedom conflict. Despite Rahner’s pretension to the contrary, everything ultimately hangs on God’s freedom alone. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ are not equal.

Highfield indicts Rahner for ‘wanting to have it both ways.’ He maintains the equality of the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as possibilities for the fundamental option, but insists that one fulfills the divinely intended end of the human person, while the other proves ‘self-destructive and contradictory.’ Highfield writes, ‘To maintain the abortive, self-destructive, and non-sensical nature of the “no” to God (as we must in Christian theology), we must admit that this “no” to God cannot be free in the same sense and to the same degree as a “yes”.’ ⁹³ Then he makes the definitive point in his prosecution of Rahner: ‘But Rahner does not make this admission. Why? The answer is simple: it would contradict his claim to have demonstrated the possibility of the Christian doctrine of sin as a free and definitive “no” to the true God, the central thesis in his doctrine of sin.’ ⁹⁴ The problem with Highfield’s conclusion is twofold: first, Rahner does make ‘this admission,’ and second, the answer is not simple.

Three pages in Foundations of Christian Faith prove crucial for answering Highfield’s objections. They include sections titled ‘“Yes” and “No” to God Are Not Parallel,’ and ‘On the Interpretation of Eschatological Statements.’ The section titles illustrate that Rahner admits the discrepancy between the ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and that he sees this discrepancy as bearing upon eschatological reality. To be fair, Highfield knows about Rahner’s admission of the discrepancy, even though he also blames Rahner for not making this admission. Thus I am not presenting evidence entirely left out by Highfield. Nevertheless, one must reread Rahner to see that his treatment of the ‘no’ is no less serious for his admission that the ‘no’ and the ‘yes’ are not strictly parallel.

For Rahner, the contradiction latent in the ‘no’ does not impede thought, but spurs it. The ‘no’ is an indispensable mystery. It cannot be explained away, nor can it be denied: ‘We shall have to allow this possibility to exist as the “mystery of evil.”’ ⁹⁵ Highfield makes it sound as if Rahner does not let this mystery stand. But Rahner does, to the point that he still treats the ‘no’ as an ‘ultimate possibility’ for human freedom. ⁹⁶ A remark from Rahner’s ‘On Martyrdom’ can illustrate how the ultimacy of the ‘no’ can coincide with its deficiency with respect to the ‘yes’: ‘Liberty for good is the stronger liberty; it is a freedom in which man is involved in his totality, a liberated freedom which blossoms and flows. Evil liberty fails, wills too little, shrinks from pure and unconditional giving; it is anxious, it counts and calculates; it is full of suspicion and is afraid of purifying suffering.’ ⁹⁷ Still Rahner maintains that one may not exclude evil liberty as a decisive possibility. Otherwise, one would undermine scriptural descriptions of people being cast into eternal fire (e.g., Mt 18:8–9; Rv 20:15). Rahner views such descriptions as ‘instructions about the absolute seriousness of human decision.’ ⁹⁸

Rahner’s comments on eschatological statements are often criticized as being too ‘subjective’ or involving an undue ‘anthropological turn.’ ⁹⁹ But, frankly, these criticisms betray less an insufficiency in Rahner’s own theology than in how commentators misapprehend him. Their misreadings of him are, after all, understandable, given the difficulty of Rahner’s thoughts on freedom. In Grace in Freedom (1968), Rahner discusses the ‘transcendental horizon of freedom’ as the ground for a ‘no’ to oneself that, by implication, denies God’s existence. This ‘no’ would both affirm God’s existence (as Creator of creaturely freedom) and deny it. It is an ‘ultimate absurdity.’ Even so, Rahner contends,

The real possibility of such an absolute contradiction in freedom cannot be denied, though it is denied and doubted in every vulgar theology. This happens whenever it is said that the infinite God could regard a tiny aberration in the finite world as no more than just finite, and hence could not magnify it by an absolute prohibition and an infinite sanction, considering it is directed against the divine will as such. According to this view the will which such a sin would offend is the divinely willed finite reality, and if we assumed another offense over and above this we should wrongly place God’s will like a categorial individual reality beside that which is finitely willed. Nevertheless freedom makes it possible to say no to God. Otherwise there would be no freedom of the subject. ¹⁰⁰

As Rahner notes, his position on the definitive ‘no’ to God seems to involve a contradiction, which Rahner’s commentators demand that he resolve or abandon. But telling is Rahner’s comment about theological vulgarity. Rahner has a sense that the difficulties he lays bare will be ignored or skirted by most theologians. Rahner explains what he takes to be the quintessential example of sin: denial of God. He suggests that most theologies work themselves to exhaustion trying to discuss how such a denial could occur, and they end by giving up, proclaiming that this sin is a contradiction and thus impossible. At best it is a category mistake, since it reduces the infinite God to the purview of finite action. This, of course, is essentially the accusation Highfield brings against Rahner.

It is tempting to follow the suit of common theologies and to adopt a simple approach to the contradiction between the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to God. Rahner attempts a more nuanced approach: even though God’s grace is victorious in Christ, and thus in principle should hold sway over human freedom, gearing everything toward salvation, real sin remains possible. Human freedom really can be destructive: this is not just an illusion, and it is not just temporary. Human freedom can reject God in sin, and can cause real havoc on God’s creation in the process. From its very origin our freedom is profoundly dangerous.

It could have helped if Rahner had specified sin in the way that, for example, Jon Sobrino advises in The Principle of Mercy (1992): ‘The New Testament and liberation theology insist that the analogatum princeps, the prime analogate, of sin consists in murder: murdering the Son of God and continuing to murder the sons and daughters of God in history.’ ¹⁰¹ Speaking of sin as ‘murder’ rather than a ‘no’ to God could concretize his position. Rahner would be less suspect of imposing a transcendental philosophy of freedom on theology, and his view of sin could be more easily placed historically, thus evading the kinds of critiques Ho-Tsui considers from Metz and other political-liberationist theologians. But another idea from Sobrino is even more important at this juncture: his fundamental agreement with Rahner’s notion that ‘only the forgiven know themselves as sinners.’ ¹⁰² Radical sin is recognizable only once forgiveness has been received and accepted. Forgiveness helps the sinner to recognize that he is a murderer, an oppressor, or someone who has lost hope in God, and empowers the sinner to undergo radical conversion. Rahner had, of course, thought deeply and broadly about forgiveness and conversion in his studies on penance. This all means that if we must critique Rahner on the fundamental option, we should critique him not on the grounds of conceptual difficulties, but because he does not draw a tight enough connection between his idea of the fundamental option and his studies on sacramental forgiveness in penance. The ‘no’ to God is not a formal possibility revealed through conceptual analysis, but a material, historical possibility (or actuality) revealed through its redemption by Christ’s grace, extended to the sinner by the church.

This brings us back to the thought with which I began this section: in order for guilt and suffering to be adequately addressed at their deepest dimension, one needs theology and the church. Rahner writes in a cultural climate in which existentialist and psychotherapeutic views of the human person have largely replaced traditional theological notions of sinfulness and guilt. He makes apologiae for the continued significance of Christian thought and practice even amid these challenges by emphasizing the depth dimension of Christian mercy and sacramental forgiveness. Theology today faces analogous challenges. Perhaps the most important, which implicates but covers a wider territory than the structures of oppression such as Sobrino confronts, is the proliferation of debt under neoliberal capitalism. ¹⁰³ While the entrenchment of the creditor–debtor relationship in recent decades may seem like a new normal condition, forgiveness of debt—the extension of mercy—could reveal it for what it is: sinful, not ephemerally or venially, but deeply and mortally. And ecclesial mercy could be a driving force toward this revelation. Though Rahner does not discuss these particular issues (debt of this sort was just emerging as a problem in his final years), the ideas on sin and mercy discussed here could provide a theological idiom for treating them now. And like the preaching and teaching of Pope Francis, this theological idiom could provide an impetus for Christians to enact ecclesial mercy since, as we learned from Rahner’s penance studies, the whole church should be involved.

Conclusion

This article joined a renewed conversation on Karl Rahner’s ideas on sin to discover how sin fits within his theological corpus and how the twin Rahnerian themes of sin and mercy might be more adequately commented upon than they have hitherto. A survey of Emmie Ho-Tsui’s book laid out the overall systematic coordinates of Rahner’s teaching on sin. A section on Rahner’s historical and systematic studies on the sacrament of penance presented these studies as under-accessed resources for understanding Rahner’s view of the church as a communal sign of God’s mercy. Consideration of Rahner’s 1953 article on guilt and forgiveness clued us in to the depth dimension of Rahner’s view of sin, and consequently of the deep human need for the mercy God gives through the church. The classic Rahnerian idea of the fundamental option, which certain commentators find incoherent or unhelpful, was vindicated against such critiques based on connections that may be drawn between it and the penance studies. Radical sin is revealed by radical mercy, which sustains deep conversion. I ended with an expression of hope: that theologies of sin and mercy such as Rahner’s will foster a reappropriation of the ethos of mercy that is proper to the church, even if—because of our sinfulness—we Christians often fail to accept this ethos as our own. ¹⁰⁴