Ekklesia Part VI: Karl Rahner's View of the Church

This is the sixth in an eight-part series on the nature and mission of the Church in the world today. As Roman Catholics, we believe that being a disciple of Jesus means living out our faith commitment through active involvement in the community called Church. In this series, we are exploring the origins and characteristics of this community, as well as some of the challenges that the Church faces in the contemporary world.

When we explored the teaching of the Second Vatican Council about the Church, we saw that the bishops labored diligently to formulate a renewed vision of the Church. They engaged in this work with the help of expert theologians who worked on commissions that drafted the major texts of the council. Great thinkers like Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Joseph Ratzinger, Augustin Bea and many others labored “behind the scenes” to formulate a fresh account of the nature and mission of the Church. Karl Rahner was another of these prominent theologians whose thought influenced the Council and whose theological writings after the Council helped to shape the vision of many Catholics. Rahner was a theological assistant to Cardinal Franz Kőnig, the Archbishop of Vienna who himself was a very influential figure at the Council.

Rahner was from the town of Freiburg in Germany. He grew up in a close family of modest means and saw one of his older brothers, Hugo (a theologian in his own right), join the Jesuits. After high school, Karl also decided to study for the priesthood with the Jesuits. Gifted with a brilliant mind, Rahner engaged in private philosophical and theological study that was not part of the curriculum for seminarians at the time. For example, he closely studied the philosophical thought of Immanuel Kant, and he carefully investigated the writings of theologians of the early Church. After his doctoral studies in philosophy did not work out (his professor did not like his dissertation!), Rahner obtained a doctorate in theology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. He began to teach on the faculty at Innsbruck in 1937, but his work was interrupted when the Nazi army rolled into Austria in July of 1938. Rahner was forced to leave that region of Austria during World War II, but he continued his theological work and also engaged in pastoral ministry to those affected by the ravages of that war. After the war, he taught at Innsbruck and in various universities in Germany for more than thirty years. Many of his essay on theological topics were collected in a series the English title of which is Theological Investigations. This series numbers 23 volumes in English. Rahner died in 1984.

Rahner thought long and hard about the nature and mission of the Church from the beginning to the end of his career as a theologian. He loved the Church and was dedicated to its flourishing. Rahner was a forthright person who could at times be critical of the institutional Church. His criticisms, however, were always the observations of loyal Catholic who emphasized the importance of commitment to the Church. Rahner did not think that one could be a Christian, in the full sense of that term, without a commitment to and active involvement in the community called Church. Two themes that are present throughout his writings are: the Church as sacrament of the saving grace of God; and the Church as the little flock. Let’s explore each of these themes briefly in order to gain a better understanding of the contributions that Karl Rahner has made to Catholic ecclesiology.

The Church as Sacrament of the Salvific Grace of God

For Rahner, the biblical account of divine revelation tells us that God created the world in order to give God’s self to human beings. While God could (theoretically) have created the universe and the human family and remained the distant, unapproachable God, we know that has never been the case. From the very beginning of human history, God wanted to enter into a covenant relationship with us. Rahner expresses this foundational insight in these words: “God wishes to communicate himself, to pour forth the love which he himself is. This is the first and last of his real plans and hence of his real world, too. Everything else exists so that this one thing might be: the eternal miracle of infinite Love. And so God makes a creature whom he can love; he creates man [sic].” One might ask: “What is the meaning of the universe? What is the meaning of human life?” To such a question Rahner would likely respond: “There is a God, and this God wanted to give himself in love.” God created this vast universe of ours, and God created you and me, in order to give himself as One to be known and loved.

Rahner stresses that because we are body-spirit creatures, God’s gift of self becomes tangible. God’s grace is enfleshed so that we can experience and respond to it. He would affirm that God’s self-communication reached its highest and unsurpassable point in human history in the incarnation – when the Word of God became flesh in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God’s loving gift of himself has become fully personal in human history. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God’s self-communication is definitively offered and accepted. The reality of Christ the incarnate Word means that God’s salvific grace will ultimately be victorious for human history and for the world as a whole, even if the destiny of the individual remains an open question to be decided in freedom.

In order for the salvific work of Christ to be truly victorious in human history, it must continue to be tangible in the world. The abiding presence of grace is an integral part of the victory of God’s grace in Christ. Jesus would not be who he is unless God’s offer of himself in Jesus continued to remain present in the world in and through real people, a visible community. This is what happens in the Church. The Church, then, for Rahner is the sacrament of the saving grace of God that has become victorious in Christ. In one place Rahner describes the Church as “the continuation of the historically tangible reality of Christ.” The Church is the sign and instrument of Christ’s saving presence in human history. Through the Church Christ is made present to human beings of every age in a way that is real and effective.

This is what the Church, and what each individual Christian, is and is meant to be: a sacrament, a living sign of the presence of God’s bountiful love poured out in Christ. The mission of the Church in the world is to make the saving grace of God in Christ present and effective in the lives of people of all times and places. The Church does this in many different ways. It makes Christ present in a preeminent way through the seven sacraments. Rahner says that the individual sacraments are essential functions of the Church in which the Church realizes its intrinsic nature. When the Church addresses the word of grace to individuals at significant moments in their lives, the Church performs a sacrament. It is in the Eucharist that the Church most fully realizes what it is as the sacrament of Christ in the world. The Eucharist is the supreme realization of the Church itself and the origin of all the other sacraments. Catholic Christians are a Eucharistic people. We come again and again to the table of the Lord to experience his real presence in order that we may become signs and instruments of Christ’s presence in the world.

The Church of the Little Flock

Throughout his career as a theologian, Rahner gave a lot of thought to the status of the Church in the modern world. He thought that the world in which we live was becomingly increasingly secular. It was a world in which the minority status of Christians would become more accentuated in the future. He expressed these thoughts as early as the 1950’s. In an essay authored before Vatican II, he said, “After two thousand years of its history Catholic Christianity is still confined to a small fraction of the human race, and, despite all successes in the mission field, this minority is growing steadily smaller, because numerically the human race is increasing more rapidly than the number of conversions.” He noted that the social supports for religion in general, and for Christianity in particular, were falling away. Looking at the world of the late twentieth century, Rahner was convinced that living as a faithful Christian – really taking discipleship seriously – was becoming a bigger challenge and required a deeper commitment than in the past. The Church was becoming the Church of “the little flock.”

In one way, this situation is lamentable. Rahner thought, however, that Christians should accept this reality and seize the opportunity found in it. Rather than simply complain about the “decline of religion,” Christians should continue to trust in God’s promise and persevere in their commitment to witness to the Gospel. Rahner thought that the Church of the future would “appear more personal and less institutional in nature.” It would be a community of people who had made a personal decision to follow Jesus and to live as the sacrament of his presence in the world.

In one early essay, Rahner wrote about an experience that many Christians have today – the lack of family support for the practice of the faith. He knew that the contemporary Christian often lives in a situation where he or she feels like a “minority” within the family. Once again, he counsels believers to accept this situation and recognize that a stronger, more deeply rooted, faith is called for. He knows that many Catholics and other Christians struggle with this challenge, and he thinks that it actually represents a kind of modern-day martyrdom. Rahner advises believers to be courageous in clinging to their faith but not to sever ties with their families. He writes that the person of faith must remain confident in God and he observes that faithful prayer, good example and acceptance of this situation “are more important means for caring for relatives’ souls than exhortation, preaching and similar activities of directly apostolic zeal.” In other words, Christians today are faced with the challenge and opportunity of being sacraments of Christ’s saving love within their own families.

There are many other keen insights about the nature and mission of the Church that Rahner offers in his theology. But these two – the Church as the sacrament of the salvific grace of God in the world and the Church as a little flock – are particularly relevant to us today. Every Catholic Christian needs to understand that he or she has an essential role to play in the mission of the Church. Every Christian is, in some sense, a “missionary.” In Rahner’s categories, this means that every Catholic is called to live and act in such a way that he or she is a living, effective sign of the saving love of God poured out in Christ. We engage in this mission in a society in which the practice of Christianity no longer has the popularity or social supports that it once had. I have often heard someone say that he or she is the only practicing Catholic in their family. Rather than just lament this situation, we are invited to see in it an opportunity to develop a stronger, more courageous faith in Christ and to accept the challenge of witnessing to the Gospel in word and in deed. As Jesus said, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.”

Robin Ryan, CP