Word: rahner
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...council ended its first session last week-it is scheduled to reconvene in Rome next September-Rahner's admirers could claim that he had exerted more real influence on the council than any other theologian. Professor of dogmatic theology at Innsbruck University, Jesuit Rahner is personal theologian to both Franziskus Cardinal Konig of Vienna and Julius Cardinal Dopfner of Munich. Despite opposition to Rahner by many Italian churchmen, Pope John named him to the select group of periti, the official council theologians. In Rome's Catholic bookstores, his writings are bestsellers. "We can't keep this...
...Language. Churchmen who know Rahner's work have strong opinions about him. U.S. Jesuit Theologian Gustave Weigel calls him "the world's greatest theologian." Many conservative churchmen, on the other hand, view Rahner's work with suspicion and hostility. Three weeks ago, Monsignor Francesco Spadafora of Rome's Lateran University told a gathering of Mexican bishops that Rahner was a "formal heretic." Cardinal Ottaviani, too, suspects Rahner. has tried three times to get Rahner's work formally condemned, and last month vainly asked Pope John to send Rahner back to Innsbruck...
Much of the conservative suspicion of Rahner stems from his Socratic approach -he keeps relentlessly asking questions, dangerous, thought-prodding questions. Rahner believes that each generation must rethink the problems of theology for itself. He never rejects outright the dogmatic definitions of past councils or Popes, but he is constantly asking what the words of those definitions really mean. "The theologian of today," he says, "must be in search of a new language. We've got a lot of things to rethink. A holy boldness is needed...
...Rahner's boldness has led him to reconsider church teaching on everything from ethics to eschatology, from the meaning of the parish to the nature of political power. "Rahner," says Cardinal Konig, "sees new aspects behind every traditional teaching." In his study of the relationship of the hierarchy to the Pope, for example, Rahner argues that the highest authority in Catholicism is not the Pope but the Pope in union with his bishops. When the Pope decides a matter for the entire church, says Rahner, he does so not by virtue of his own office alone, but as head...
...Jolting Challenge. For many Catholics, morality is essentially a matter of sticking to the rules laid down by the church. But Rahner, notes an admiring fellow theologian, "sees the moral life not merely in terms of acts but rather of basic commitments." The world, in Rahner's vision, is full of "anonymous Christians"-men who may formally disbelieve in Christ or the church, but who nonetheless have made a personal and total surrender to the truth of an "unknown God." For Rahner, these truth-wedded men are, in a sense, Christians also-perhaps better Christians than those reared...