Abstract
Karl Rahner acknowledged freely that “the anonymous Christian,” as a category, could be problematic. His interest, he stressed, was not in the term but in understanding the universality of God’s grace and the access of all people to grace. Reception of Rahner’s theology of salvation, however, has often neglected this broader framework to focus on the term itself. This article, which engages Rahner’s theology of grace in both its ecclesiological setting and its universal reach, argues that this theology can be an asset to dialogue even in the context of religious pluralism.
Pluralism features prominently in the contemporary religious landscape. As a sociological and demographic phenomenon, pluralism brings to the fore some of the human realities that shape the profiles and perceptions of religions. Large-scale migration, ever-expanding forms of access to information, and myriad forms of cultural exchange have either redrawn the religious map in many countries or increased awareness that the world’s faiths are not interchangeable. As a political phenomenon, religious pluralism raises questions about the links between faith and national identity—“one country under God”—as well as those between faith and national unity. Politics also enters in when religious and secular values clash, as they do regularly around issues that fuel “the culture wars.”
Away from sociology and politics, burgeoning religious pluralism raises consequential questions for theologians who engage with the similarities and differences between religions, and with the possibilities for interreligious dialogue. To be fruitful, this engagement requires research into topics ranging from sources of revelation to stances on social justice issues, and from religious authority to forms of worship. Interreligious commitments also confront theologians of all stripes with the need to consider the expansiveness of their own tradition, including its capacity to learn and not simply to teach.
Broadly speaking, history has not prepared Christian communities well for fertile participation in dialogue with a changing religious context. The Acts of the Apostles chronicles the earliest disciples’ efforts to understand themselves and their mission in relationship to Judaism, but these encounters were often fraught and conflictual. Until recent times, Christian history records hostility to other religions far more than instances of positive exchanges. More specifically, Catholic Christians, especially in the long period of separation from their Protestant sisters and brothers, defined themselves largely in isolation from other Christians, let alone people of other faiths. Catholics, consequently, have often lacked resources, particularly in formerly “Catholic countries,” for negotiating the cultural shifts and burgeoning religious pluralism evident in the last few decades. The history of isolation and antipathy to the religious “other” also did little to pave the way for a constructive reception of the impetus toward dialogue that flowed from the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate.
Comparative theology, which has emerged as a distinct category within the panoply of contemporary theology, seeks to respond to religious pluralism not merely creatively but also in a genuinely theological manner. Even prior to the emergence of this specialization, theological reflection on religious pluralism had begun. This article focuses on one such theological endeavor: Karl Rahner’s notion of the anonymous Christian.
Rahner’s approach is well known but has certainly not garnered universal approbation. Critics along the political spectrum within the Catholic Church have summarily rejected this aspect of Rahner’s theology, indicting Rahner either for abandoning the specificity of Christian faith or for propagating a Christian imperialism that seeks, patronizingly, to impose on other religions categories that are unknown in their own traditions. 1 Both critiques tend to depict the anonymous Christian as a one-dimensional formula, even though the fabled complexity and density of Rahner’s thought would imply that there is more to his proposal than the critics allow. More substantially, if the anonymous Christian is more than a random suggestion from Rahner, if it has connections to his larger theological vision, then there would seem to be at least a prima facie need for more careful consideration of it than has often been evident.
The thesis of this article is that a measured assessment of the anonymous Christian requires an appreciation of its relationship to both the larger themes of Rahner’s theology and to its setting within the chronology of Rahner’s work. In other words, a more complete evaluation of the concept requires a hermeneutics of retrieval, not simply a hermeneutics of suspicion. Shearing the anonymous Christian from its anchoring in Rahner’s wider theology, especially his all-embracing theology of grace, obscures the nuances proper to Rahner’s argument. It is undeniable that Rahner was far from being a comparative theologian avant la lettre. He was, however, a theologian who devoted unflagging attention to where and how grace might be at work in history. This same attention underpins his perceptions of the world’s religions. If Rahner’s theology has enduring value for dialogue between religions, this value surely derives from his appreciation for the universality of grace.
Accordingly, Rahner’s theology of grace is the keystone of this work. The article will first locate Rahner’s theology of grace in relation to his understanding of revelation and his theological anthropology, then turn to the Christ-centered, Spirit-formed, and church-related dimensions of this theology. Included in this latter overview is a sketch of Rahner’s understanding of the impact of history and culture on the possibility of an explicit relationship to Christ and the church. With these markers in place, the final section will concentrate on “the anonymous Christian,” being attentive to its location in the historical development of Rahner’s theology and the specificity of Rahner’s analysis of the concept. The concluding reflection will consider what Rahner’s approach to grace and pluralism might offer to contemporary theologians as an example of the task of theology and the work of the theologian.
Rahner’s Theology as a Theology of Grace
Grace, especially “uncreated grace,” is at the heart of Karl Rahner’s theology. 2 As uncreated, grace is the self-communication of God. Rahner’s emphasis on uncreated grace brings into relief the identity of grace as other than an addition to an already composed landscape. Grace is not simply one element of life; it is neither exceptional nor rare but “primordial,” the defining constituent of the whole of creation. 3 As such, grace “remains anonymous, implicit, unthematic, like the widely and diffusely spread light of a sun which we do not directly see.” 4 In Rahner’s assessment, the theology of grace is a theology of revelation—“the communication in which God gives Godself to [humanity] as the divinizing favor which God is”—no less than of creation and eschatology since God’s self-communication brings about life, sustains it, and orients it to fulfillment in God. 5
Rahner insists that God is creative not through efficient causality but as formal causality, through God’s self-communication. “Let there be . . .” (Gn 1:3) encapsulates this causality, showcasing the creative effects of God’s self-expression. Rahner adds “quasi” to his analysis of formal causality to highlight both “the meta-categorical character of God’s abidingly transcendental formal causality” and the “analogical nature of our concepts in the matter of a relationship to the world known only through Revelation.” 6 Through his presentation of the uniqueness of God’s creativity, Rahner establishes the omnipresence of grace without collapsing God into the world that God sustains. Equally, Rahner distances his presentation of God’s self-revelation in grace from any suggestion that humanity might have the capacity to manipulate God. The revelatory experience of grace “is given as an incitement and a way to the closest immediacy of communion with him, [and] it is all the more an opening into the immeasurable, a beginning of the illimitable.” 7 Human beings, in short, neither initiate nor control grace. Like all creatures, human beings are always recipients of the God who transcends all created realities, even as intimacy with God is integral to humanity.
To document the pervasiveness and omnipresence of grace, Rahner compares it to “Australia.” Contemplating the world from the setting of Western Europe before the age of frequent jet travel and instant communication, Rahner perceives Australia as something so exotic as to be alien to the lives of most people. Australia’s remoteness and opacity serve a twofold catechetical function for Rahner. First, Australia stands in contrast to grace. Since most people learn about Australia in a secondhand way, dependent on the experience of others—“you yourselves have not been there but others have travelled there and geographers have proved its existence”—it differs from grace. 8 Grace, as the quasi-formal cause of all life, is inescapable, constitutive of everybody’s “everyday” reality. 9
Second, Australia illuminates—again, by contrast—that grace is a revelatory encounter with the transcendent mystery of God. If Australia’s remoteness renders the country a “mystery” beyond most people’s immediate comprehension—“the statement that there was a river XY in Australia would be a mystery, because not being an Australian, I can only know about it if I am told”—it is a mystery only in a relative sense. 10 Firsthand knowledge would confirm or refute the claim about the river and the possibility that “in Australia there is a mountain of gold as big as the Matterhorn.” 11 God, on the other hand, the God who is central to all life, is always “the mystery past all grasp,” never subject to humanity’s definitive understanding but nonetheless universally present in grace. 12 To engage the paradox of God as the life-giving mystery universally present in grace yet ungraspable, Rahner relies on his theology of symbol.
The theology of symbol develops and deepens Rahner’s approach to God’s self-revelation in grace. Rahner understands a symbol as the means through which all beings, God included, “‘express’ themselves in order to attain their own nature.” 13 Symbols, then, do not simply point toward something; they make present what is other than the symbol but nonetheless inseparable from it: “(what is) one with the origin, while still distinct from it, must be considered as the ‘expression’ of the origin and of the primordial unity.” 14 Significantly, Rahner connects his analysis of symbols to Aquinas’s ideas on formal causality: “the ‘form’ gives itself away from itself by imparting itself to the material cause.” 15 From this perspective, every encounter with the created world—“the categorical”—is an experience of the incomprehensible mystery that sustains life. Rather than identifying a discrete object named “God,” these symbolic encounters offer a Vorgriff, a “pre-apprehension” whose “whither” (Woraufhin) is the transcendent God. 16
The theology of symbol presents God as “the innermost principle of the world’s movement,” doing so without diminishing God’s transcendence. 17 Relationship to God, therefore, is not a matter of definitive knowledge or unshakeable possession of an object. Rather, relationship with God involves acceptance of “being overwhelmed by light inaccessible, which shows itself as inaccessible in the very moment of giving itself.” 18 For this reason, encounters with grace can be “unthematic,” such that it is impossible to isolate grace as a discrete component of experience subject to exhaustive analysis. 19
Rahner employs his theology of symbol to elucidate how God’s self-communication might be accessible to all human beings. No less importantly, the theology of symbol complements his theological anthropology. Beginning with his earliest writings in the 1930s, Rahner maintained that expressing “the inexpressible,” the transcendent, ultimate mystery, was impossible for human beings without “images which come from the realm of sense knowledge.” 20 Humanity’s experience of God, in other words, is never less than genuinely human experience mediated through the body, through words, reason, and community, among other factors. 21 In this vein, Rahner affirms the symbolic value of “heart” as a pivotal example of Urworte, “words which by their charm forge a unity, make reality first present to us, make us subject to them, spring from our hearts, come to us as a gift and transport us.” 22 This description points toward the central role that Incarnation plays in his theology while also foreshadowing how Rahner imagines the universality of the human experience of grace—both of these are themes on which subsequent sections of the article will elaborate.
By identifying grace as the atmosphere in which all living beings dwell, Rahner lays the foundation for his principal anthropological claim: “the capacity for the God of self-bestowing personal love [as] the central and abiding existential of human beings as we really are.” 23 Only God, then, can fulfill humanity; only God can satisfy humanity’s “obediential potency,” the God-given ability to be a “hearer of the word,” that is “the free revelation of God.” 24 Critically for Rahner’s understanding of the interplay between grace and human freedom, this universal orientation to God does not program human beings to ensure a positive relationship with God, nor does it render inevitable a profession of faith or the religious practices contingent on such profession.
Remarkably, Rahner emphasizes that the unrestricted capacity to reject the boundless love of the life-giving God is a core aspect of the human freedom that grace enables. From this perspective, human sin “is at root merely the refusal to entrust [oneself] to this boundlessness; it is a lesser love which, because it refuses to become the greater, is no longer love at all.” 25 Freedom for Rahner “is self-achievement of the person . . . before the infinite God,” the capacity to “dispose” of oneself, to be responsible for one’s own decisions, irrespective of one’s physical setting and without the requirement to choose for rather than against God. 26 Even more, Rahner stresses that when—always through grace—this potency actually flowers into an explicit relationship with God, it does so without compromising God as the “horizon which recedes further and further the more answers [we] discover.” 27
Rahner’s stress on God as the ultimate mystery at the heart of all life has eschatological implications that weave through his theology. As Rahner presents it, God’s self-communication in grace does not merely begin life or even simply sustain life in history; it orients human beings toward God, who is “the absolute future,” a designation that relativizes the value of all intramundane futures. 28 This emphasis enshrines “hope” as a principal feature of Rahner’s theology—“hope alone is the locus of God as [the one] who cannot be controlled or manipulated, and so of God as such.” 29 As the next section of the article will discuss further, both hope and humanity’s eschatological orientation challenge the church to be wary of the interweaving temptations of triumphalism and exclusivism, temptations relevant to the Catholic Church’s perception of its place in the world and its relationship to other religions.
The elements of Rahner’s theology of grace just surveyed are well known. Together, they forge a hermeneutical key for charting the connections between his theological reflections on a vast array of topics, reflections that are anything but arbitrary and unrelated to each other. Rahner’s project, in a nutshell, is to trace the symbolic presence of grace across the gamut of human experiences, identifying how it is, as in Urworte, that “a piece of reality is connoted, in which a door is mysteriously opened into the unfathomable depths of true reality in general.” 30
Rahner’s aim is evident whether he is writing about childhood and old age, sleeping and eating, suffering and death, poetry and art, science and nuclear weapons, or even The Beatles. Yes, Rahner did indeed write a short piece on The Beatles, proceeding neither as a musicologist explaining the similarities and differences between the contributions of John Lennon and Paul McCartney nor as a semiotician exegeting “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” but as a theologian interested in how humanity encounters grace. In the latter mode, the lesson that Rahner learns through reflection on The Beatles relates to grace at work in the world. Thus, he argues strongly that the church must be attentive to popular culture as a locus of grace: “are not indeed—thanks to the grace of God which is everywhere—love, loneliness and everything that these records testify to closer to what we mean when we say ‘God’ than we initially think?” 31
The universality of grace that is Rahner’s persistent emphasis would seem to provide a congenial framework for thinking about religions as a venue for the encounter with grace. This conclusion, however, becomes less obvious in the face of Rahner’s analysis of the specificity of grace. Grace for Rahner was universal but never generic, never separable from its christological, pneumatological, and ecclesiological dimensions. So specific are these three qualities that it might seem that grace, far from being the primordial constituent of human life, has a limited purview. If the latter were true, grace would be inaccessible for all those who lack an explicit relationship to Christ and the church. If this conclusion were an accurate reflection of Rahner’s understanding of grace, the anonymous Christian would be a patronizing approach to religions other than Christianity and even churches other than the Catholic Church. As a step toward assessing whether such a judgment is valid, the next section will examine his presentation of the christological, pneumatological, and ecclesiological dimensions of grace.
Grace as Christological, Pneumatological, and Ecclesiological
Rahner’s advocacy for the primacy and universality of uncreated grace cuts through the calculus by which neo-Scholastic theologies of grace cataloged and measured opportunities for access to God. In a similar way, his Christology challenges prevailing interpretations of God’s salvific action in Jesus Christ. Unlike those theologies of the atonement that accentuate humanity’s sinfulness as the primary motive for the Incarnation, Rahner does not regard the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as God’s “Plan B,” a strategy for remediating sin’s impact on God’s original vision for creation. Rather, the Incarnation of Jesus, notwithstanding its revelation at a particular moment in history, is “the unique summit and the ultimate basis of God’s relationship to creation.” 32
In this way, Rahner echoes the Scotist ordering of the relationship between creation and Incarnation, depicting the latter as “the prior setting and condition for the supreme possibility of [God] imparting [Godself] ‘to the outside world.’” 33 While grounding the Incarnation in God’s self-communication as uncreated grace rather than exclusively in the deleterious impact of human sinfulness, Rahner also distinguishes the Incarnation from the end product of an evolutionary process. The Incarnation was never less than God’s free act, such that “the fact of creation (as nature) does not necessarily imply the actual realization of the self-exteriorization of God in the Incarnation.” 34 God, then, remains free.
The prominence of the Incarnation in Rahner’s theology colors his understanding of salvation and the Savior, “that historical person who, coming in space and time, signifies the beginning of God’s absolute communication of [God] which inaugurates this self-communication for all people as something happening irrevocably and which shows this to be happening.” 35 Rahner argues unequivocally that God’s self-giving could be final and unsurpassable only if it was genuinely self-giving, the expression of divinity in history. Viewed in this light, Jesus is God’s pledge of binding commitment to the whole of creation, thereby establishing Christmas as the celebration of the coming of “the infinite into the finite.” 36
As the expression of God’s eternal desire for the fulfillment of creation, Jesus also testifies to God’s power to overcome sin. Although Rahner is far from ignoring the salvific implications of the death and resurrection of Jesus, the centrality of the Incarnation in his theology reflects the weight that he gives to the whole history of Jesus Christ. Equally, he insists that Christian faith is “the proclamation of a saving history in which the true absolute which is significant for [humanity] is the historically concrete” rather than “merely a doctrinal system of eternal ideas.” 37 For Rahner, a metaphysical or ontological approach to Christology is deficient without its necessary complement: “saving history” Christology. The words and actions of Jesus in history are the catalyst for gaining insight into the breadth and depth of God’s love, which embraces the whole of humanity’s experiences, even “the absurdity of guilt and death.” 38
Faith in Christ, as Rahner profiles it, is acceptance of “the absolute Mediator of salvation, now and always.” 39 This faith fuels hope for eternal salvation. Rahner stresses that in and through Jesus Christ, “the one and single history of the world as a whole can no longer fail, even though the question of how the personal history of the individual will turn out remains open, and belongs to the absolute future of God.” 40 Consistent with the eschatological framework characteristic of his theology of grace, Rahner asserts an inextricable link between authentic Christian faith and “the state of radical openness to the question of the mystery of the absolute future which is God.” 41 Such openness is foundational to grappling with changes in the historical circumstances of the church, including the emergence of religious pluralism.
While certainly applicable to the future, Christian hope is also for the present. Everyday life places before all people the question of whether they would “accept twilight as promise of an eternal Christmas” or “become cynical and cling all the more desperately and absolutely to what has not yet been taken from us.” 42 Christian hope, born from the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, can embrace the twilight. This embrace is a response to the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, who makes present the grace of Jesus Christ.
As already noted, Rahner prizes everyday experience as the realm of the Holy Spirit, through whom humanity has access to “the fulfillment of the bottomless abysses of our nature.” 43 Through the Spirit, the whole of humanity, without exception, can experience the love of God, “who loves in us, loves squanderingly, loves exultingly, loves not egotistically desiring.” 44 The universality of the Spirit confirms for Rahner that “mystical experience” is not reserved for specialists or virtuosi; rather, it “is an experience which any Christian (and indeed any human being) can have and can seek, but which is easily overlooked or suppressed.” 45 Through grace, all people can perceive “the unfathomability of God” in “the seemingly unfamiliar unfathomability of our existence” that confronts each person in the world of the everyday. 46
Rahner insists not only on the universality of the Spirit’s presence but also on the personal appropriation of grace, an emphasis that aligns with his analysis of the dynamics proper to human freedom. This appropriation does not necessitate an explicit relationship to the Spirit, nor does it require “categorial content of knowledge” or of “overtly ‘religious’ material.” 47 What is proper to a fruitful response to the Spirit are forms of action that embody God’s life-giving grace: “Here is someone who can manage to forgive, although they gain no reward for it. . . . Here is a person who renounces everything without thanks.” 48 Such responses, which are clearly not the exclusive preserve of members of the church, express acceptance of personal responsibility in decision-making, especially in those decisions that build up or impede others: “the hour of victory for the grace of Pentecost is also the hour of responsibility in its most intense form.” 49 Constructive engagement with the Spirit also has an eschatological dimension, indicating a desire for the fullness of God. This desire resists reduction of the Spirit’s activities to “providing the flavor and the trimmings” of a life that human beings seek to control. 50
The third ingredient of Rahner’s theology of grace is the church. Rahner is unreservedly an ecclesial theologian: “Because the church is there, therefore, there is also a continual Pentecost.” 51 At the same time, Rahner is anything but naïve about the obstacle the church could be to a healthy relationship with God. He warns regularly that the church might “stifle” the Spirit, might become a “closed system” whose bureaucratic structures render grace less accessible. 52 While alert to this possibility, Rahner does not resile from his conviction that the church, in Christ and through the Spirit, is more than “an incidental option” for people seeking to make their response to God something other than private and invisible. 53
Rahner’s ecclesiology knits together the elements that identify the church as a sacrament, the metaphor that suffuses his ecclesiology. 54 As sacrament, the church is a work of grace, but it is also a social and historical reality. Grace challenges individualism with the communal identity of the church, just as the connection between institution and truth challenges a narrowly charismatic understanding of Christian faith, and vice versa. 55 Through grace, the church is to reflect the freedom that the Spirit enables.
As a Spirit-formed body, the faithfulness of the church and the effectiveness of its mission in the world derive not from its structures or the deeds of outstanding individuals but from “the bold powerlessness of the Spirit, and of hope.” 56 A corollary of the primacy of grace in Rahner’s ecclesiology is his conviction that faith in the church flows from faith in God. Faith, understood as a trusting response to grace, is “logically and psychologically” prior to “belief in the Church’s authority, and supports, rather than being supported by, belief in the teaching authority.” 57 Ecclesial faith, in other words, has roots in the graced relationship to God that is the patrimony of all human beings.
In relation to salvation, Rahner interprets the church as offering “objective aids” to help believers move toward the eschatological fulfillment that faith in Christ and the Spirit promises. 58 These aids, including Scripture, the sacramental life, and guidance for ethical decision-making, are elements of an explicit relationship to Christ mediated through the community of faith. Similarly, the communal nature of the church, stretching across time and cultures, belongs irreducibly to the church’s existence as a “leaven,” one whose effects do not depend entirely on its influence being observed. This leaven, far from compelling attention, could be at work “where the flour has not (yet) changed itself into a leavened dough in a way which is tangible for us.” 59 For this reason, Rahner gives no evidence of any anxiety about the fact that “a point will never arise in the world’s time at which the Church will achieve a total victory such as can be manifest in terms which this world can recognize.” 60
Rahner acknowledges that not even all baptized Catholics have a deep and all-embracing relationship with the community of faith. Hence, he promotes the need for a theology of “ecclesiological marginality.” 61 This theology would interpret “border-line Catholics” as “centripetal” rather than as “centrifugal,” as people with the capacity to grow closer to the community of faith, to expand on the grace of their baptism, rather than as people who would inevitably abandon membership of the church. 62 Rahner asserts that “the faith of the average Christian is not just a pitiable sketch of the official faith. It is a salutary faith borne by God’s self-communication.” 63 In stating this, Rahner associates salvific faith with a broad sense of receptivity to the Spirit, not solely with professed belief. This point too is relevant to how Rahner situates the members of other faiths in relation to grace.
This article has commented several times on the eschatological themes intrinsic to Rahner’s theology of grace. Predictably, then, this same emphasis is present in his ecclesiology. Rahner’s advocacy of the need for an eschatological awareness is certainly evident when he reminds the church that it must do more than merely conserve the present, especially when the stress on conservation involves restricting the freedom of the church’s members or opposing “projects for the future which could have actually brought about more freedom and which, contrary to the church’s concrete wishes and prognoses, often actually did so.” 64 To forestall such flawed ways of proceeding, Rahner urges the community of faith, in all its manifestations, to develop a “self-critical” spirit. 65 Self-criticism could protect the community from the illusion of perfection and from presuming ownership of the Spirit. It could also open members of the church to acknowledge the movement of the Spirit beyond themselves.
Rahner is convinced that the self-critical attitude would enable the church to engage constructively with broader society, perhaps even offer society possibilities for a healthy relationship between freedom and authority. 66 A self-critical church, then, stands in sharp contrast to the church as “a clerical, religiously camouflaged kind of totalitarian system.” 67 Rahner underscores also that the self-critical spirit differs from what was evident in much of the missionary history of the Catholic Church. Throughout this history the church often resembled an “export firm,” sending “to the whole world a European religion along with other elements of this supposedly superior civilization and culture.” 68
The presumption of the “export firm” was that only through the agency of the Catholic Church could grace become present in cultures and religions beyond European Christianity. Rahner’s theology of revelation and his theological anthropology dispute this presumption. Even more, as the analysis in this section has indicated, Rahner’s Christology, pneumatology, and ecclesiology do not support the contention that access to grace is limited to the members of a gated community of the saved. Rahner establishes unambiguously the particularity of grace, but his presentation likewise amplifies his conviction that all people—from popes to unbelievers—can both appropriate grace through their God-given freedom and embody grace in their everyday lives in the world.
Grace, Pluralism, and Anonymity
It might seem that a theology that affirms the presence of grace outside of explicit religious communities, and yet profiles it in terms of Christ, the Spirit, and the church, would stumble into contradiction or confusion. Strikingly, Rahner sees no necessary clash between the two affirmations. Insisting that salvation is not contingent on professed faith and ecclesial membership and that the fulfillment of grace is eschatological rather than historical, Rahner is at ease with the fact that a person receptive to grace might never embrace an explicit relationship to Christ and the church. 69
After the Second World War, Rahner’s writing increasingly turned to trends in history and culture that affected both the possibility and shape of faith in Christ lived within the ecclesial community. He began to engage regularly with envisaging the movement of grace beyond the traditional channels emblematic of the post-Reformation European setting from which his own theology emerged. Rahner’s theology of the anonymous Christian is a product of this engagement but not its sole fruit.
When Rahner began canvassing the impact of cultural change on the prospects for Christian faith, his focus was not on religious pluralism. In fact, the object of his reflections was the dilemma faced by those with an active commitment to ecclesial faith who found themselves among their “unbelieving relations.” 70 This new context, evident in families as well as in larger bodies, emerged as communities that had once been homogeneous became more diverse as fewer people followed the traditional paths of faith and as secular culture became more and more independent of ecclesial oversight.
Rahner’s response to this cultural phenomenon adumbrates the dynamics he articulated for the presence of grace among anonymous Christians. From the 1940s onward, Rahner articulated an understanding of “the diaspora,” a term indicative of the circumstances that made Christians “strangers in the world.” 71 Far from despairing about these developments, he argued that the emerging social trends could facilitate a more personal appropriation of grace and ecclesial membership since there would no longer be societal pressure to belong to the church. 72
As ever, Rahner’s theology of grace was key to his hopeful evaluation of the prospects for faith, even for explicitly ecclesial faith, amid cultural pluralism. Rather than dismiss secularization as “atheistic profanisation” of the world, Rahner reiterated his conviction in the universality of grace and of the graced capacity of the church to be a positive presence in the world. 73 At the same time, Rahner named unambiguously the challenges that changing cultural circumstances posed to the church. These challenges required from the church new ways of thinking and acting, ways that Rahner summarized as a “practical ecclesiological cosmology.” 74 The form of practical theology that Rahner envisaged encompassed the willingness to accept that the social and ecclesial conditions of previous eras no longer applied, the recognition that doctrinal principles could not resolve every question, the openness to study and learn about society, and the commitment of the church to see itself as a dialogue partner with the secular world, in the manner of Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes. 75
Rahner’s approach to the church’s interaction with cultural pluralism has echoes in his interpretation of religions other than Christianity, and so for the anonymous Christian. Used as a slogan, “the anonymous Christian” is more accessible than many aspects of Rahner’s work. Separated from its theological matrix, however, the label can sound shallow and imply ideas he was not proposing, such as the inevitability of universal salvation. Rahner recognized the difficulties of the term, championing its underlying theology rather than the term itself. 76 To provide the fullest possible perspective on this aspect of Rahner’s theology, and to complete the “return to the sources” that this article has pursued, it is crucial to clarify what Rahner did and did not intend with his discussion of the anonymous Christian.
As a first step, it is important to record that most of Rahner’s articles on topics related to the anonymous Christian appeared during the 1960s and 1970s. This timing locates them within the period when the reception of Vatican II was his primary interest. In particular, Rahner mined the council’s “new image” of the church for its potential to enable fruitful engagement with society’s emerging pluralism and secularization, factors not necessarily conducive to church membership. 77 Further, Rahner found in both Lumen Gentium and Ad Gentes validation for his conviction about the universality of grace. 78 Beyond the council, Rahner’s grounding in the reality of the church’s social and historical circumstances is central to his theology of the anonymous Christian, which expresses his realization that the greater part of the world’s population is neither Christian nor Catholic. 79
In formulating his ideas on the theme of the anonymous Christian, Rahner was neither articulating a theology of religions nor discouraging the church’s efforts at evangelization. His purpose was to illustrate that a yes to Christ, to “the grace of the mystery which has radically approached us,” was not the exclusive product of a direct response to the church’s proclamation. 80 Nor was this yes a marker identifying all the baptized, such that every unbaptized person was automatically an anonymous Christian. Rahner was particular in reserving the designation for the person who, without having received the gospel, lives nonetheless “in the state of Christ’s grace through faith, hope, and love.” 81
Rahner is consistently emphatic that even the church’s evangelization did not introduce grace where it had previously been absent. 82 In like manner, he contends that the saving effectiveness of grace “can be present in an implicit form whereby a person undertakes and lives the duty of each day in the quiet sincerity of patience.” 83 The church’s proclamation, nonetheless, could be a catalyst for “the awakening of something which is really already existent through grace and is already experienced, even if it is not the object of explicit reflection.” 84 There was, then, the possibility of a specific relationship to Christ and even to the ecclesial community, but this relationship was always the product of grace rather than its genesis.
Rahner’s focus on the eschatological orientation of grace also left him free to support the church’s efforts at evangelization without overlaying these efforts with the burden of being the only means to ensure that people without other access to grace might avoid damnation. To support his claim that grace was present before the hearing of any explicit preaching of Christ, Rahner invokes Aquinas’s view that a penitent’s desire for forgiveness was a sign of justifying grace at work prior to the penitent entering into the sacrament. 85
In relation to non-Christian religions, Rahner aligns himself with Nostra Aetate’s support for “a patient and positive co-existence of the Church with other religious communities.” 86 Further, he is clear that “supernatural elements arising out of the grace which is given to humanity as a gratuitous gift on account of Christ” are present in non-Christian religions. 87 These religions, then, could be more than “new conglomerates of natural theistic metaphysics and as a humanly incorrect interpretation and institutionalization of this ‘natural religion.’” 88
Although Rahner’s theology of the anonymous Christian presents all religions in a positive light, it is vulnerable to the critique that he did not approach other religions on their own terms but in terms of the grace of Christ. This observation is true, but Rahner’s purpose was not phenomenological, not an investigation into varieties of religious experience. Rather, he offered a way to interpret for a time of religious pluralism the Christian conviction that God wills the salvation of all people and does so in and through Christ (1 Tm 2:4). He also offered a way for members of the church to have a positive perspective on the possibility of salvation for the unbaptized, doing so without diminishing the importance of ecclesial faith.
There is a parallel, mutatis mutandis, between Rahner’s approach to the anonymous Christian and his ecumenical theology. In advocating for reconciliation between the divided churches, Rahner stressed that a closer relationship between them required each community to appropriate its own convictions more deeply, as doing so would provide a basis for dialogue with other communities and could thereby enable closer relationships. 89 Convergence, in other words, would not be the fruit of each “side” abandoning basic beliefs but seeking ways to meet each other where those beliefs were congruent or at least not irreconcilable. While the parallel is imperfect, as different religions are not simply different churches within a divided communion, Rahner’s guiding principle on the universality of grace pervading history, cultures, and all humanity ensures that mutual alienation and exclusion are not all that religions share.
Rahner as a Theological Guide
It may be that the terminology of the anonymous Christian will not age well as an aid to dialogue between faiths, perhaps especially because it is a name that Christians might give to others who would not choose it for themselves. The fact that Rahner regarded the term as less than final, as an initial response to all that Vatican II promoted in relation to non-Christian religions, also indicates that its longevity was not his focus. Whatever the future of the term, perhaps the more important reflection on the theology of the anonymous Christian concerns Rahner’s purpose. In bringing the religious context specific to his moment of history into relationship with the tradition’s stress on the universality of God’s grace, the historical particularity of God’s revelation, and the eschatological orientation of God’s offer of salvation, Rahner models the creative fidelity that is essential for the future of a living tradition.
In “The Prospects for Dogmatic Theology,” an article he wrote in 1954, Rahner asserted that “anyone who pursues the study of theology, moved by the spirit of his time and an eager religious life and a desire to make a real proclamation to his own time, will experience soon enough the impact of new questions, questions which only obtain their clarification and solution by careful and disciplined theological investigation.” 90 Rahner’s theological biography exemplifies the truth of this maxim.
Whether considering the enduring validity of Chalcedon’s christological formula, or whether the church offered any “ultimate certainties,” Rahner sought to be attentive to the stirrings of the Spirit in the present, to distill the abiding truth at the heart of the ecclesial community, and then to grapple with how this truth might find expression in the present. 91 In doing so, he practiced the “practical ecclesiological cosmology” that he promoted, as an earlier section of this article mentioned. Rahner’s consideration of the anonymous Christian fits the same profile: alert to the changing religio-cultural patterns of his own time, and respectful of the long tradition proclaiming the necessity of faith in Christ, Rahner tunnels below superficial considerations to articulate a theology that seeks to be faithful and creative, doing so by drawing out the implications of God’s presence in the world through uncreated grace.
In his 1954 reflection on theology, Rahner vividly expressed the importance of creativity to the church’s tradition of faith: “anything which is merely conserved, or which is merely handed down without a fresh, personal exertion beginning at the very sources of Revelation, rots as the manna did. And the longer living Tradition is interrupted by mere mechanical handing down, the more difficult it may become to restore contact again.” 92 For Rahner, the living tradition was inseparable from the mystery of God. Rahner esteemed Aquinas as an exemplar of the surrender to the mystery that confronted all theologians, challenging them to move “out of the brightness of the dimension which we can comprehend and into the mystery of God where we no longer grasp but rather are grasped.” 93 Rahner’s theology of the anonymous Christian is likewise a response to God’s mystery experienced through the emerging reality of religious pluralism.
Rahner definitely did not speak the final word relevant to relationships between Christianity and other religions. Yet, his commitment to dialogue, to self-criticism, to the primary elements of Christian faith, and, most particularly, to the universality of God’s grace can still indicate directions for theologians committed to the creatively faithful reception of the tradition in the light of the present.
Footnotes
1.
A well-known critique of the anonymous Christian from a doctrinal perspective is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Cordula oder Ernstfall (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1966), 85–97; an example of the “patronizing” perspective is Hugh Nicholson, “The New Comparative Theology and the Problem of Hegemonism,” in The New Comparative Theology: Thinking Interreligiously in the 21st Century, ed. Francis X. Clooney (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 43–62 at 44–45.
2.
Karl Rahner, “Some Implications of the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 319–46.
3.
Karl Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 36–73 at 41.
4.
Karl Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 189–210 at 199.
5.
Karl Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 165–88 at 177.
6.
Rahner, “Uncreated Grace,” 330–31.
7.
Karl Rahner, “Current Problems in Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 149–200 at 149.
8.
Karl Rahner, “The Foundation of Belief Today,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 3–23 at 11. See also his “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 115–34 at 131.
9.
For an appreciation of Rahner’s stress on the “everyday,” see, for example, his Everyday Faith, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968); see also Harvey Egan, Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life (New York: Crossroad, 1998).
10.
Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery,” 45.
11.
Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery,” 45.
12.
Karl Rahner, “Ignatius of Loyola Speaks to a Modern Jesuit,” in Karl Rahner: Spiritual Writings, ed. Philip Endean (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 41.
13.
Karl Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 221–52 at 224.
14.
Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 228.
15.
Rahner, “The Theology of the Symbol,” 231.
16.
Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” 181.
17.
Karl Rahner, “Christianity’s Absolute Claim,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 21, trans. Hugh M. Riley (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 171–84 at 175.
18.
Rahner, “The Concept of Mystery,” 56.
19.
Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978), 53.
20.
Karl Rahner, “The ‘Spiritual Senses’ according to Origen,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 81–103 at 81.
21.
For a list of what Rahner identifies as “human existential dimensions,” see his “The Dignity and Freedom of Man,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 235–63 at 240–41.
22.
Karl Rahner, “‘Behold This Heart!’ Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart [orig. 1953],” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 321–30 at 322; see also Rahner, “Priest and Poet,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 294–317.
23.
Karl Rahner, “Concerning the Relation between Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 297–317 at 312.
24.
Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word: Laying the Foundation for a Philosophy of Religion, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Continuum, 1994), 16.
25.
Karl Rahner, “Theology of Freedom,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 178–96 at 188.
26.
Rahner, “Dignity and Freedom,” 246–47. See also his “Guilt–Responsibility–Punishment within the View of Catholic Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 197–217.
27.
Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 32.
28.
On God as “the absolute future,” see, for example, “Marxist Utopia and the Christian Future of Man,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 59–68, and “A Fragmentary Aspect of a Theological Evaluation of the Concept of the Future,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 10, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 235–41.
29.
Karl Rahner, “On the Theology of Hope,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 10, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1973), 242–59 at 255.
30.
Rahner, “Behold This Heart!,” 326.
31.
Karl Rahner, “What Do The Beatles Sing?,” in Karl Rahner’s Writings on Literature, Music and the Visual Arts, ed. Gesa E. Theissen (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 190–92 at 192.
32.
Karl Rahner, “The Eternal Significance of the Humanity of Jesus for Our Relationship with God,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 35–46 at 43.
33.
Karl Rahner, “Christology in the Setting of Modern Man’s Understanding of Himself and of His World,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 11, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 215–29 at 220.
34.
Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” 176.
35.
Karl Rahner, “Christology within an Evolutionary Worldview,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 157–92 at 174–75.
36.
Karl Rahner, “Thoughts on the Theology of Christmas,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 24–34 at 28.
37.
Rahner, “Christology in the Setting,” 222.
38.
Karl Rahner, “The Two Basic Types of Christology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 13, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 213–23 at 215.
39.
Karl Rahner, “‘I Believe in Jesus Christ.’ Interpreting an Article of Faith,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 9, trans. Graham Harrison (New York: Seabury, 1972), 165–68 at 168.
40.
Karl Rahner, “The Quest for Approaches Leading to an Understanding of the Mystery of the God-Man Jesus,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 13, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 195–200 at 200.
41.
Karl Rahner, “The Question of the Future,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1974), 181–201 at 189.
42.
Karl Rahner, “Following the Crucified,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 157–70 at 170.
43.
Karl Rahner, “The Helper-Spirit,” in The Need and Blessing of Prayer, trans. Bruce Gillette (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 20.
44.
Karl Rahner, “The Helper-Spirit.”
45.
Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 193.
46.
Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 204.
47.
Karl Rahner, “Experience of the Spirit and Existential Commitment,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 16, trans. David Morland (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 24–34 at 29.
48.
Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 200–201. See Rahner’s full list of actions reflective of responses to grace on pages 200–203.
49.
Karl Rahner, “The Spirit That Is over All Life,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 193–201 at 199.
50.
Rahner, “Experience of the Holy Spirit,” 204.
51.
Karl Rahner, “The Church as the Subject of the Sending of the Spirit,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 186–92 at 190.
52.
Karl Rahner, “Do Not Stifle the Spirit!,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 72–87 at 74–78.
53.
Karl Rahner, “Concerning Our Assent to the Church as She Exists in the Concrete,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1974), 142–60 at 148.
54.
For an overview of the sacramental focus of Rahner’s ecclesiology see, Richard Lennan, The Ecclesiology of Karl Rahner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 15–44.
55.
Karl Rahner, Grace in Freedom, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 171–72.
56.
Karl Rahner, “Opposition in the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 17, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 127–38 at 138.
57.
Karl Rahner, “Does the Church Offer Any Ultimate Certainties?,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 14, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1976), 47–65 at 50.
58.
Karl Rahner, “Membership of the Church according to the Teaching of Pius XII’s Encyclical ‘Mystici Corporis Christi,’” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 1–88 at 59.
59.
Karl Rahner, “Dogmatic Notes on ‘Ecclesiological Piety,’” in Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 336–65 at 361.
60.
Karl Rahner, “Perspectives for the Future of the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1974), 202–17 at 202.
61.
Karl Rahner, “The Church’s Responsibility for the Freedom of the Individual,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 20, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 51–64 at 61.
62.
Karl Rahner, “On the Structure of the People of the Church Today,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1974), 218–28 at 224–26.
63.
Karl Rahner, “What the Church Officially Teaches and What the People Actually Believe,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 22, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 165–75 at 169.
64.
Rahner, “The Church’s Responsibility,” 56.
65.
Rahner, “The Church’s Responsibility,” 56. See also Karl Rahner, “The Function of the Church as a Critic of Society,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1974), 229–49.
66.
Rahner, “The Church’s Responsibility,” 59.
67.
Karl Rahner, “Freedom in the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 2, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 87–107 at 99.
68.
Karl Rahner, “Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 20, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 77–89 at 78.
69.
Karl Rahner, “Church, Churches, and Religions,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 10, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 30–49 at 39–40.
70.
Karl Rahner, “The Christian among Unbelieving Relations,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 3, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 355–72.
71.
Karl Rahner, “The Prospect for Christianity,” in Free Speech in the Church, trans. G. Lamb (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1959), 61.
72.
73.
Karl Rahner, “Theological Reflections on the Problem of Secularization,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 10, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 318–48 at 319.
74.
Rahner, “Theological Reflections,” 337.
75.
Rahner, “Theological Reflections,” 337–41.
76.
On the difficulties inherent in the term, see Karl Rahner, “Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 12, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1974), 161–78 at 162–64.
77.
Karl Rahner, “New Image of the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 10, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1977), 3–29.
78.
Karl Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 6, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 390–98 at 398. Rahner refers to Lumen Gentium, §16, and Ad Gentes, §7.
79.
Rahner, “Church, Churches, and Religions,” 31.
80.
Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” 394.
81.
Karl Rahner, “Observations on the Problem of the ‘Anonymous Christian,’” in Theological Investigations, vol. 14, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury, 1976), 280–94 at 283.
82.
Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” 394.
83.
Rahner, “Anonymous Christians,” 394.
84.
Karl Rahner, “Religious Feeling inside and outside the Church,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 17, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 228–42 at 231.
85.
Rahner, “Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church,” 173–74.
86.
Karl Rahner, “On the Importance of the Non-Christian Religions for Salvation,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 18, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 288–95 at 289.
87.
Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” 121.
88.
Rahner, “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” 130.
89.
See, for example, the case that Rahner makes for dialogue in “Third Church?,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 17, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 215–27; see also his “Some Remarks on the Question of Conversion,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 5, trans. Karl H. Kruger (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 314–35.
90.
Karl Rahner, “The Prospects for Dogmatic Theology,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 1–18 at 6.
91.
See Rahner’s “Current Problems in Christology” and his “Does the Church Offer Any Ultimate Certainties?”
92.
Rahner, “Prospects for Dogmatic Theology,” 10–11.
93.
Karl Rahner, “On Recognizing the Importance of Thomas Aquinas,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 13, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad, 1975), 3–12 at 8.