Robert Masson: Spirituality for the Head, Heart, Hands, and Feet: Rahner's Legacy

SPIRITUALITY TODAY
Winter 1984, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 340-354.
Robert Masson:
Spirituality for the Head, Heart, Hands, and Feet: Rahner's Legacy

Karl Rahners theological achievement provides a basis for future spirituality which will give us a truly Christian center in which we can stand in our complex world of dichotomies and diversities.

Dr. Masson, assistant professor in the Department of Theology at Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has published articles in Heythrop Journal, Horizons, The Thomist, and Living Light.

SOME might question David Tracy's claim that "there is probably no Catholic theologian writing today anywhere in the world who does not bear Rahner's imprint" or Tracy's placing him as the "most influential Catholic thinker since Newman."(1) But there can be no doubt that Rahner had a significant impact on contemporary Catholicism, and to a certain extent on Protestantism as well. It is possible, however, that his legacy will be of even greater significance to the future of theology and spirituality. The church today is at a crucial juncture. It is badly in need of theologies and spiritualities which address the whole person -- head, heart, hands, and feet -- and which overcome false dichotomies which threaten its life and identity. It is quite possible that Rahner's theology will not itself play that role in a significant way in the years to come. He did not purport to establish a comprehensive theological system or a definitive foundation for theology. In fact he was convinced that an irreducible diversity of theologies and spiritualities would be required in the future. But the path he charted does provide a paradigm, road markers, and points of departure for the theological agenda of the future. This assessment is so obviously at odds with the one recently proposed in these pages by Donald Gelpi that an explanation is perhaps in order.(2)
My estimation of Rahner's legacy has as much to do with the present state of theology and spirituality as it does with his particular contributions. The church is at a critical point in history. Rahner himself argued that we are witnessing the beginning of a new epoch: the transition from a church of the Hellenistic and European culture and its colonies to a world -- church embodied in many different cultures. This "coming-to-be of the world-church," he insisted, "does not mean merely a quantitative augmentation of the earlier church, but contains a theological caesura in church history which . . . can be compared perhaps only with the transition from Judeo-Christianity to Gentile Christianity" in the first century.(3) The traumas entailed in so profound a transformation are manifested, in part, in the often bitter tensions within the church since Vatican II. A number of commentators have described this period as one of internal conflict, confusion, polarization, apathy, self-doubt, loss of self-esteem, and crises of identity. They picture recent shifts in theology and spirituality as swings of a pendulum back and forth from the right to the left, from transcendence to immanence, from spirituality to social activism, from ecclesial authority to freedom of conscience, from orthodoxy to orthopraxis, and from unity to pluralism. The suggested remedies call for countering an excessive swing in one direction with a good hard push in the other. Thus a conservative reading of the present situation calls for a reemphasis on transcendence, personal piety, ecclesiastical authority, and orthodoxy, while a liberal reading calls for stressing the human dimension, increased social and political involvement, greater latitude for the individual conscience, and emphasis on right living over doctrine.
The difficulty with such proposals, however, is that at least by themselves they do not provide adequate criteria for locating the center or an adequate optic for discovering genuine unity in a diversity of truths. Instead, the center is determined by one's prior assumptions about what is extreme. It shifts as perceptions of what is extreme shift. The diversities of God's abundance become dichotomies. Unity is equated with uniformity, pluriformity with pluralism. The underlying and fundamental theological issues about the relation between the divine and. human, and grace and nature remain unclear and often unexamined. Consequently, although everyone (traditionalists, moderates and progressives, church officials and independent-minded theologians) may claim to redress the imbalances and excesses of contemporary theology and spirituality, polarization and confusion have not appreciably diminished. In fact, the strategy of correcting the swings, of the pendulum seems frequently to have heightened tensions and further obscured the heart of Christian faith. A different agenda is required, one that will provide a theological grammar for locating the center and a spirituality for living within it.
THEOLOGIAN OF HEAD OR HEART?
Rahner is often characterized as a theologian of the "head." His a priori transcendental method, because of its intellectualist bias, systematically slights dimensions that are crucial for the theological agenda proposed just now. Critics have objected that his theology forces revelation into the categories of anthropology or of one philosophical system, that his turn to the subject as a point of departure does not highlight adequately the essentially interpersonal character of human existence and of God's relationship to it, that his transcendental method is not sufficiently historical or does not emphasize the social and political dimensions as much as it should, that his epistemology underestimates the role of imagination and affectivity, and that his theology of grace with its concepts of the supernatural existential and anonymous Christianity is unable to account adequately for genuine religious diversity, for the importance of conversion, for the uniqueness of Christ, or for the necessity of the church for salvation. Such objections are not entirely without merit.(4) But the characterization of Rahner as anything other than a theologian of the head, heart, hands, and feet misrepresents the consistent thrust of his contributions as an author and editor. When his fragmentary and occasional works are read with some feel for the whole and with an appreciation for the development of his thought, their overall balance of vision is both undeniable and impressive.
If just one term must be chosen to characterize Rahner's theological orientation, it should be "heart" rather than "head." It is true that the primary paradigm for human existence in his first work, Spirit in the World,(5) is the dynamism of the intellect towards God, and that a transcendental analysis of knowing is offered as justification. It is also true that this cognitive model is operative in some form or other in most of Rahner's later essays. His use of the word heart, however, in several of his early and often overlooked essays suggests that from the beginning there were elements of a more comprehensive paradigm.(6)
Those essays focused on heart as the embodied and affective unity of the person. Appealing to the use of the word among mystics and poets, he argued that heart in the most fundamental sense is neither the physical organ nor a metaphor for spirit or soul. Rather it denotes the concrete unity of body and spirit prior to any sort of distinction between them. When a person acts or speaks from the heart, his or her intellect, will, and gesture are one. Rahner's very suggestive essays on poetic and religious discourse showed that this unity is concretely and affectively manifested, among other places, in those''primordial" words of the mystic and poet spoken from the heart and to the heart in which "spirit and flesh, the signified and its symbol, concept and word, thing and image, are still freshly one."(7) Even as defined in Spirit in the World, the human person is not a spirit in a body, nor a body to which spirit is added. The human being is a radical unity of what is only subsequently experienced as distinct. It is very clear in the later essays that the dynamism of the human being, as Rahner conceives it, is not the movement of intellect alone, but the dynamism of heart, that is to say, of intellect, freedom, will, and love. This dynamism is achieved and manifested in humanity's concrete embodiment, not just or even primarily in the intellect's subsequent reflection.
Leaving aside for now questions about the evidence for this transcendence towards God as horizon, what seems particularly problematic to many of Rahners critics is his identification of the dynamism of the heart with love. This move, of course, is entailed in one of the most basic and characteristic claims of Rahners theology, namely, that God's grace is somehow "always and everywhere present at the very heart of human existence."(8) If grace is always present at the inmost core of each person, then what real significance is there to freedom? to the historical events of revelation? to the necessity of Jesus or the church for salvation? to the personal history and conversion of the individual? or to the apparent diversity of religions? And what evidence is there, after all, of this grace at the heart of human life?
By itself, resort to his specific concepts like the "supernatural existential" or"anonymous Christianity" is of little help in responding to such questions, since those concepts presuppose a more comprehensive paradigm which is precisely what is at issue here. The contours of that paradigm were elaborated over several decades throughout Rahner's numerous writings but nowhere comprehensively in a systematic way. Still, despite the risk of simplification, it is possible to sketch its broad outlines. In fact, it would be difficult to see what Rahner intends by his claim that grace is at the heart of human existence without hazarding such a sketch.
OPENNESS OF THE SPIRIT
Rahner, as we noted already, conceived the human person as embodied spirit. On the one hand, bodily reality is not something added onto the human spirit but is essential to it. Human knowing, choosing, and loving always have a physical dimension. But on the other hand, the human person is more than an animate body. In knowledge and freedom, we are present to ourselves as open to more than what is intuited bythe senses or grasped in objective knowledge. To the degree that we know the limits of objective knowledge, our knowing transcends the limits of what we know objectively; it is "open" to something "more" than the known objects. To the degree that we act freely, that is to say, to the degree that we determine ourselves, our freedom transcends the determination of the world about us; it is "open" to something "more" than the objects of our will and so is not determined always and entirely by them. But we never grasp this "more" itself as an object which can be directly known or willed. It is known only indirectly as the limitless horizon presupposed in the anticipation or "foregrasp" of knowing and willing. Nor is this "openness" of knowledge and freedom directly observable or grasped, even though it is the condition of possibility for knowing or willing anything in the first place. That we really know or are truly free -- that we are genuinely spirit, cannot be proved, as it were, from the outside. The obstinacy of behaviorists and determinists shows that in specific concrete cases freedom is not easily seen or proved. So our openness (spirit) is explicitly grasped only through a reflexive process. That is why Rahner insists on distinguishing between the knowledge of objects directly grasped through the senses and judgment, which he calls objective or categorical knowledge, and the reflexive "grasp" of self and God presupposed in objective knowledge but not known objectively, which he calls transcendental knowledge. That is also why he believes that transcendental analysis of some sort or another is particularly appropriate for speaking of the spiritual dimension.
Rahner, of course, identifies God with the limitless and nameless whither of this openness. God, then, is implicitly affirmed in every judgment and free act, yet remains mystery in the most radical sense of the term. This openness, or transcendence, in the world towards God is the essence of personal becoming. We come to consciousness and establish our identity precisely and only in the stance we take in knowledge and freedom towards the world, which stance implicitly reaches beyond towards God.
Our world, moreover, is a personal world. The other which is the object of knowledge and will is either another person, or an other that is mediated through a language, community, and culture which have been created by persons. But personal being is free; and as Rahner demonstrated in Hearers of the Word,(9) another who is free cannot be understood adequately from the outside as an object. Since persons are self-determining and consequently independent and irreducible, they can be understood only by an act which seeks to grasp the person empathetically, as it were, from the inside out. But this sort of will of one person in his or her underivable unity to be present to another in his or her underivable unity is love. So the dynamism of intellect and will is, in the final analysis, the dynamism of love. Persons come to themselves, become persons, only through openness to others and to God. It is important to emphasize, as Andrew Tallon has, that this vision is radically interpersonal despite its historical origin in an analysis of subjectivity that employed rather impersonal categories.(10) Community with other persons and with God is essential to personal becoming because human existence is essentially interpersonal. Unity with other persons and openness towards God are the condition of possibility for self-establishment. The more one moves out towards the world of others and towards God, the more one is free to be one's self.
Although questions about the validity of these arguments are reserved for later, it is worth noting that this conception of God as mystery, while clearly emphasizing the infinite difference between the divine and the human, does not oppose God and humanity. Indeed, as we have just seen, quite the opposite is the case. The dynamism towards God is the condition of possibility for becoming human. Our humanity -- that is, our self-presence, self-actualization, freedom, and love -- increases rather than decreases with proximity to God. Rahner's concept of God as horizon, consequently, has a very different logic than Tillich's, which requires an absolute qualitative gap between the divine and human. Rahner is not, as Gelpi suggests, saddled with the logic of Tillich's position just because both speak of God as the infinite horizon of being.(11)
DIVINE AND HUMAN NOT OPPOSED
Rahner does see a radical difference between the divine and human. God absolutely transcends us. God is not at our disposal. God is mystery in the most radical sense, and can be known only as the silent and unfathomable whither of transcendence -- unless, that is, God has blessed us with a self-communication of some sort. That is just what the Christian believes God has done in Jesus. In him, divine and human become one.
Attributing so radical an identity between this man Jesus and God is possible in Rahners view of things, on the one hand, because humanity and divinity are not opposed. Unity with God does not make one less human or less free, but to the contrary is the condition of possibility for the perfection of humanity which, experience teaches, eludes each of us. On the other hand, Rahner's conception of the "realsymbol" enabled him to explain how it is possible to affirm a difference between Jesus' humanity and God, despite the assertion of their identity.
Every being, Rahner contended, is manifested through a multiplicity of characteristics. This multiplicity is constitutive of the being. Without my build, eye and hair color, voice, idiosyncrasies, IQ, personal history and experience, and all the other peculiarities which constitute my being, I simply would not exist. But at the same time, a being is not simply a composite of such characteristics. The multiplicity does not add up to me. Someone or something given my physical attributes and programed with my knowledge and experience (were such a thing possible) would still not be me, however clever the reduplication. Nor is the multiplicity through which I now constitute myself at all the same as the bundle of flesh and desires which my mother nursed and diapered years ago, even though I am the same person, and despite the image that mothers have of their grown babies.
This multiplicity, the being's realsymbol, is constituted by the being. So the identity between the being and its realsymbol is genuine and very intimate. But the realsymbol is not simply and absolutely identical with the being which it manifests. Given this understanding, Rahner was able to argue that since God is triune (a multiplicity in unity), it is possible to imagine the humanity of Jesus as God's realsymbol. It is possible because the divine and human are not opposed (being one with God would not make Jesus any less a man!) and because in the realsymbol something plural can be constituted by a reality which, despite their identity, is still distinct from it. Moreover, the distinction between knowledge, freedom, and love at the categorical level and at the transcendental level suggests that it is possible to imagine that Jesus would have to acquire a language, culture, and personal history like the rest of us, and that he too would have to discover his identity, despite its uniqueness, in terms of such acquisitions.
If, as God's love incarnate, Jesus is human to the utmost, he is so only in relation to our world and history. Jesus was not an isolated otherworldly figure who miraculously dropped from the heavens. He was born of woman and lived his life in the same world and history which we all share from our different vantage points. That world, therefore, "constitutes in a very radical sense the environment, concomitant setting, indeed the very physicality demanded by the Logos in its act of uttering itself into the non-divine."(12) The ultimate significance of our world and history is grasped, then, only when we recognize that they are not merely something to which God's presence in grace and the incarnation has been added, but rather are the prior setting and condition for the possibility of this self-communication. Our world and history are themselves intrinsic elements in God's self-expression.
In such a scheme, Jesus is absolutely necessary for salvation. If God has become one with us, it is because God freely chose to do so. The initiative for the union between God and humanity must be with God, and there must be some time and place where that initiative is realized. But since God has taken that initiative, human history and the history of God's self-communication (the history of salvation and revelation) are coextensive. Consequently Rahner argued that it is permissible to approach Christology from the perspective of what he called a "universal pneumatology." Jesus would then appear as "the unsurpassable peak of a universal history of God's self-communication to the world as a whole." In Jesus, the universal work of the Spirit reaches a point that "is no longer merely at the stage of an open offer of grace to man's freedom, but where this offer from God has been established victoriously and irreversibly, as far as mankind as a whole is concerned."(13) In this perspective, not only is there no opposition between the divine and human; humanity and human history are precisely the grammar through which God becomes one with creation. Grace is at the heart of human existence because through Jesus human history has become the history of God's self-communication.
THEOLOGY FOR HANDS AND FEET
This does not mean, however, that all of us in the depths of our hearts are full of love or explicitly aware of God's self-communication in the Spirit of Jesus. The orientation of the heart is free. Although we necessarily take a stance towards God implicitly in what we know or refuse to know, choose or reject, love or hate, no one's mind, will, or heart is compelled to acknowledge the reality of God. Since God is not grasped directly, but rather indirectly as the presupposition of knowing, loving, and choosing, it is possible to acknowledge divine reality explicitly and yet deny God implicitly -- as we say, deny God in our hearts. Or it is possible to deny God's existence explicitly in the mind while affirming it in our hearts in the stance we implicitly take towards the divine reality in what we choose to know, value, and love. Or finally, it is possible that acknowledgement (or refusal) could be both implicit and explicit, that is to say, affirmed at once in our head, heart, hands, and feet.
The presence of grace at the heart of human existence does mean, however, that wherever a real love of the truth and a genuine love of neighbor emerge in human history, that emergence must be viewed as an effect of Christ's Spirit. That is to say, at least from the perspective of Christianity, it must be viewed as an acceptance of, and so as a moment within, the history of God's selfcommunication to humanity in Jesus. "Love does not find its full realization out of its own resources but from the radical unity it has with the love of God in Jesus Christ."(14) The solidarity of God with humanity, therefore, is no abstraction. Although Rahner very definitely does not equate love of God and love of neighbor, he does view one as the condition of possibility for the other, and vice versa. "There is no love of God that is not, in itself, already love for neighbor; and love for God only comes to its own identity through its fulfillment in a love for neighbor."(15) Thus, God's love is embodied, fleshed out, in human history. Our response to that incarnation of God's love must also be fleshed out in the affairs of our daily lives.
Since those affairs differ with each person, situation, culture, and historical epoch, there is a real historicity to the manner in which we flesh out our stance towards God's revelation in Christ (whether implicitly or explicitly). "But history and historical development," as Rahner noted, "are not simply the development, the unfolding, of what is known to have gone before. History is always providing surprises. The same will be true, then, for the history of Christian love of neighbor. It too will constantly be confronted with new situations," with which it never had to reckon before.(16) In these new situations, demands will be made on Christians that are of necessity different from what is, or was, entailed in being a Christian at a different place or time. So our solidarity "in salvation history is not of the same character for every individual as this history unfolds in time."(17) There is a diversity in our experience of grace and in our consciousness and understanding of that experience. Furthermore, that diversity is of crucial importance because the differences in our experience of love, and of conversion to love, constitute the very and the only context within which God's self-communication in Christ's Spirit is accepted or rejected.
For Rahner, then, love of God was not simply an intellectual thing or a private affair. As he saw it, love of God had to be embodied in the hands and feet. And he insisted that "before all else love must today be expressed, though not exclusively, in Christian responsibility for the social sphere."(18) Likewise, for Rahner, grace was "not some merely static being, lingering behind and beneath history,"(19) or not, to use Gelpi's terminology, a "spontaneous orientation"(20) "built (somehow) a priori into the psyche."(21) Grace is mediated through the concrete history of love, which in the light of revelation, we can now recognize as the history of God's transformative self-communication. The human heart, while still free, is ordered to God ontologically, and so a priori, because of what God has done a posteriori, historically and concretely, in Christ, and because of what God in the Spirit of Christ has been doing concretely in history from the beginning and will continue to do concretely in history until the end of time.
Although the paradigm we have been describing presupposes a dynamism of love towards God, Rahner never maintained that the affirmation of grace at the heart of human existence could be proved by phenomenology or metaphysics. It would be idle to search for such proofs apart from faith because the dynamism of the heart for God is only revealed explicitly and definitively in the "shattering consequences" of revelation.(22) When Rahner sought to vindicate his paradigm, his appeal was to revelation, particularly to the teaching of Vatican II, as he understood it, that salvation is a genuine possibility for all, and that salvation cannot be gained without reference to God and Christ. The inspiration which led him to see revelation this way, he insisted a number of times, was not primarily transcendental philosophy, but Ignatian spirituality.
Furthermore, as Gerald McCool has shown, Rahner at the end of his career completely abandoned the speculative unification of science and culture which was proposed in Aeterni Patris and which seemed to be his initial objective.(23) Rahner became convinced that the diversity of knowledge and world views today is so vast that it could not be comprehended by a single individual or even synthesized by a team of experts in such a way that individuals, even the team members themselves, could appropriate it all. Consequently, a frequent theme in later works was the limits imposed on our intellects by the unavoidable and insurmountable pluralism of philosophy and theology, and by the mental or gnoseological concupiscence (analogous to moral concupiscence) which seems inherent in such a situation.
Rahner became convinced that this situation required the development of a "new literary genre" in theology. The aim of this "first level reflection," as he called it, is "to explain how a normal Christian (who cannot be an expert on all the relevant disciplines) can justify the legitimacy and meaning of his faith to himself and to others, without at the same time attempting . . . to investigate in all their complexity the problems and conclusions of all the individual philosophical and theological disciplines."(24) Rahner did not disparage the fruits of those more scientific pursuits, but he did make it clear that he did not believe any could provide a truly comprehensive and critical substantiation of even their own foundations, let alone provide that kind of foundation for faith. He did not take this position as an excuse for approaching theology's subject matter with less seriousness, as the rigor of his own reflections indicates. He took this position because he appreciated the limits of his, and of any, philosophical and theological method. If he is read without taking his frequent reservations and qualifications with the same seriousness that he took them, misunderstanding is almost certain to result.
So, although I would resist the description of Rahner as a theologian of the head, I would also argue that his essays advanced a nuanced and credible explanation and justification of the Christian faith. His transcendental anthropology, as McCool observes, "is no guarantee of an'instant common fundamental theology.'"(25) It employs philosophical assumptions that are entirely questionable from other philosophical perspectives. It has loose ends that could be tightened up, and some that do not hold and may require different kinds of knots altogether. Still, the theological perspective which results is not, as far as I can see, any less helpful or any less convincing than competing approaches, particularly when it comes to approaching the theological agenda of the future.
SPIRITUALITY OF HEAD, HEART, HANDS, AND FEET
What sort of path, then, does Rahner's theology suggest for the spirituality of the future? His own hunches have been published,(26) but my concern here is more with Rahner's theological achievement itself as offering a paradigm, road markers, and points of departure for developing theological grammars that locate the center and enable us to live within it.
First, Christian faith in the future will have to engage the whole person: head, heart, hands, and feet. Christian faith calls for a spirituality, therefore, which seeks to integrate these elements. It cannot oppose them. Orthodoxy and orthopraxis cannot be opposed to each other. Personal spirituality and social responsibility cannot be opposed. Nor should the intellectual and affective dimensions be opposed. These cannot be opposed, at least from the perspective Rahner suggested, because one is a condition of possibility for the other.
Second, Christian spirituality in the future will have to provide a grammar that avoids false dichotomies which oppose the divine and human. Because of what God has done in Christ and the Spirit, the human is found in the divine and the divine in the human. Although grace and nature, spirit and matter, and eternity and history are distinct, they are not, except because of sin, properly opposed to one another. Rahner's focus on the Incarnation as the grammar which reveals and grounds this unity of divine and human offers at least a point of departure for other theological paths and other spiritualities.
Third, Christian spirituality in the future will have to focus on the center of the faith. As Rahner said, what else can one do, given the situation of mental concupiscence, "except to return to the original central revelation?"(27) There must be such a center, he insisted, which we can make the basic support of our faith and from which we can calmly accept the totality of Christianity. This center, I would emphasize, is not located in terms of opposing poles, but in terms of the grammar disclosed in the Incarnation; and its call for spirituality is no less radical or committed than theologies of the right or the left.
Fourth, Christian spirituality in the future will have to be humble and open. If it does not appreciate both the incomprehensibility of God and the mental concupiscence entailed in the diversity of cultures, philosophies, and theologies in the world-church, then it will more than likely end up off center, either identifying revelation with one particular theological perspective, or identifying truth with a purely horizontal humanism. Rahner showed at least one way in which a humble and open spirituality can affirm both God and humanity -- both the provisional and the eschatological character of our grasp of the truth.
Fifth, Christian spirituality in the future will not only have to live with diversity; it will have to value that diversity while also patiently seeking the unity of truth and love in the pluriformity of its expressions. Rahner did not, as far as I know, distinguish between pluralism and pluriformity, as the Dutch theologian Felix Malmberg did. But the distinction is implicit in Rahner's work. Most people would grant that unity and uniformity are not the same. Revelation discloses in addition that, although uniformity may be opposed to pluralism, unity is not opposed to pluriformity, because God's self-communication is coextensive with, and so is at least to a certain extent really and truly manifested in, the diversities of human history. The spirituality of the world-church will have to take this pluriformity even more seriously than did the spiritualities of previous epochs.
Sixth, Christian spirituality in the future will have to be sacramental and dialogical. Rahner's theology did not, as is sometimes alleged, underwrite a nonkerygmatic spirituality. But Rahner did suggest a different understanding and motivation for the church's missionary activity. Its purpose is not to provide another route to solidarity with God besides the life of love, but to reveal that the dynamism of the world is indeed rooted in love, and to reveal that the goal and culmination of that dynamism is union with God through the Spirit of Christ. Dialogue from this perspective is not less but more important. The profession that God is love is idle apart from the effort to determine in each new historical, cultural, and religious context what love concretely is. The profession that the dynamism of the heart is love towards God is idle without explicit, tangible, and conscious sacraments of that love. The church as sacrament of this dynamism is thus essential to God's self-communication in human history in a way analogous to Jesus' necessity. In a world where genuine love appears less and less to be at the heart of human existence, our spirituality must be as dialogical, sacramental, and kerygmatic as possible.

NOTES

"'All is Grace': A Rooted Radical," Commonweal, 20 April 1984, p. 230.
"Two Spiritual Paths: Thematic Grace vs. Transmuting Grace," Spirituality Today 35 (1983): 241-55, 341-57. Although I certainly want to argue that the path Rahner has charted, and particularly his theology of grace, is neither a detour nor dead end, my reflections here are not offered as a direct response to Gelpi's article. His very suggestive remarks deserve a much more careful and nuanced response than is possible here in so few pages.
"Basic Theological Interpretations of the Second Vatican Council," in Concern for the Church, Theological Investigations (hereafter TI), vol. 20 (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 88.
For an explanation of my own reservations, which I would now qualify somewhat, see "Beyond Nygren and Rahner: An Alternative to Tracy," Heythrop Journal 21 (1980): 260-87.
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1967).
"'Behold the Heart!' Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart," TI 3: 321-30; "Some Theses for a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart," TI 3: 331-52. For a creative development of this heart tradition which promises a more interpersonal point of departure than Rahner's, see Andrew Tallon s "Love in the Heart Tradition," in Phenomenology and the Understanding of Human Destiny, ed. Steven Skousgaard (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 335-53; "Love and the Logic of the Heart," Listening 18 (1983): 5-22; and "The Meaning of the Heart Today: Reversing a Paradigm according to Levinas and Rahner," Journal of Religious Studies (forthcoming).
"Priest and Poet," TI 3: 297-98; see also "Poetry and the Christian," TI 4: 357-67.
"On the Theology of Worship," TI 19: 143.
The most reliable translation is Joseph Donceel's, partially available in A Rahner Reader, ed. Gerald A. McCool (New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 2-65.
Andrew Tallon, Personal Becoming: In Honor of Karl Rahner at 75 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982).
Gelpi, "Two Spiritual Paths," p. 252.
"Christology in the Setting of Modern Man's Understanding of Himself and His World," TI 11: 220.
"Foundations of Christian Faith," TI 19: 10.
"The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation," TI 16: 223.
The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor (New York: Crossroad, 1983), p. 71.
Ibid., p. 73.
"The One Christ and the Universality of Salvation," TI 16: 213.
"Foundations of Christian Faith," TI 19: 20.
"The Theological Dimension of the Question about Man," TI 17: 66.
Gelpi, "Two Spiritual Paths," p. 347.
Ibid., p. 352.
"'Behold This Heart!' Preliminaries to a Theology of Devotion to the Sacred Heart," TI 1: 327.
Gerald McCool, "Karl Rahner and the Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas," in Theology and Discovery: Essays in Honor of Karl Rahner, S.J., ed. William J. Kelly (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), p. 84.
"Foundations of Christian Faith," TI 19: 6-7. See also "Some Clarifying Remarks About My Own Work," TI 17: 243-48.
McCool, "Rahner and Christian Philosophy," p. 90.
"The Spirituality of the Church of the Future," TI 20: 143-153.
"The Foundations of Belief Today," TI 16: 8.

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