Chapter Three: Man as a Being Threatened Radically by Guilt

Christians can mistakenly believe that the world was evil before Christ and that, after his death, it essentially changed in a tangible way. Rahner avoids that misunderstanding. He defines guilt as the refusal, from the beginning of human history until now, to accept God's offer of self. Guilt is not merely a feeling of remorse about this or that sinful act. At its foundation, it is a rejection of God. It threatens the human being in a radical way, says Rahner, because the one who refuses God's self-communication refuses true freedom. In Part One of this chapter, Rahner shows just how difficult it is for people to extricate themselves from guilt. No one can escape the guilty situation -- the situation of having refused God's gift of self -- on one's own. Indeed, without God we cannot even recognize guilt for what it is. Once we admit that we have closed ourselves off from God, however, we can freely and responsibly choose the good that lies before us. With this choice we recognize God's offer of transcendence, the offer that we identify with divine mercy and forgiveness.

Scanned photo by Adolf Waschel of Vienna, published as the Frontispiece of Karl Rahner, I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview with Meinold Krauss, translated by Harvey D. Egan, S.J. (New York: Crossroad, 1985).

The freedom to act responsibly, Rahner says in Part Two, is essential to God's communication with human beings. By their free actions, people achieve their life's work and define themselves. But human freedom is never complete. We always act within a context imposed by history. We remain hearers of God's word, never the masters of it. Hence we can never know how free we are or fully assess the moral quality of our actions. This is the argument of Part Three. The self-righteous person is always capable of rejecting God. Such people delude themselves into thinking that they are acting freely and responsibly, but may in fact be doing the opposite. Conversely, a person may profess atheism in the name of human freedom, and thereby affirm God, albeit indirectly and inexplicitly. The mysterious God, who offers people freedom and invites them to act responsibly, remains the sole judge of the moral quality of their lives. Human beings cannot escape the fact that their lives are determined by a history in which people refuse God's offer to them. That is the meaning, according to the fourth part, of original sin. It is not personal guilt, but the universal guilt of people in a history marked by repeated failures to respond to God's call. This guilt is radical because it threatens the root of human freedom.

Part 1: The Topic and Its Difficulties

(III.1, p. 90). Rahner raises two questions: the nature of redemption and the manner in which it is achieved. First, he notes that our sinful acts are never wholly private. We can never reconcile ourselves by ourselves. So that is the first difficulty: how can we be reconciled to God, and to others, after we have done wrong. The second question is about how we are redeemed. Part of this is a temporal question. Rahner asks whether it is a “moment” or a “process.” The answer is to come later.

In Part 1, Rahner starts by showing that most people today regard the question of guilt as confusing or obscure. Next, he shows that we have to have a relationship with God in order to know guilt, and that the experience of guilt leads to an insight into God's love and forgiveness.

A. The Obscurity of the Question for People Today (III.1.A, p. 91). The “normal” person does not fear God as the one before whom he or she shall be judged. Fear of God means respect, normally speaking, and not terror. Even Christians (whom we expect to fear God) do not have a particularly powerful impression of their own moral dispositions. Many people see death not as judgment, but as the resolution of the confusion of daily life or even as something absurd and meaningless.

But all people compare what they should be with what they are. Even though contemporary people not usually think of death as judgment, they do believe that the human being (rather than God) is the one who needs to be justified. They ought to be open at least to the Christian message, namely, that human beings are sinners in need of redemption.

B. The Circle Between the Experience of Guilt and Forgiveness (III.1.B, p. 93). More fundamental than the obscurity of guilt is the problem of the guilty person’s relation to God. It seems paradoxical, but only when one has a “partnership” with God can one know guilt. Only with immediacy to God can we grasp it. Guilt means closing oneself off to God’s self-communication.

Guilt and forgiveness, Rahner says, have a circular relationship. We experience guilt as closing oneself off to God. When one sees oneself doing this, one is moved to an insight. The insight is that the God to whom one is closed is in fact not judgmental abut loving and forgiving.

Part 2: Man's Freedom and Responsibility.

(III.2, p. 93). The freedom of the human being: that is the topic of Part Two. Rahner asserts that this freedom is not something we have to rehabilitate by means of spiritual discipline, but is present in our every action and choice. Freedom is the essence of God’s offer to humanity. But one act of freedom influences the next, Rahner says, and all contribute to the final achievement that is the human life. Every free act expresses our relation to God, the ground of human freedom. And so in every free act, we make a decision for or against God. But because every free act is conditioned by factors beyond the individual’s control, the human being can never be certain of the moral quality of his or her decisions. There is no point at which one can say, “Now I finally understand God’s communication, and I no longer have to listen.”

A. Freedom Is Related to the Single Whole of Human Existence (III.2.A, p. 94). The concept of freedom can be understood falsely in terms of the Gnosticism we associate with Origen. He believed (according to Rahner) that life in the concrete is evil. Given this viewpoint, the Gnostic views freedom as something that existed before concrete life, even before history. As a counter concept, Rahner proposes that true freedom is “the capacity of the one subject to decide about himself in his single totality” (94). It is not something which one has to “recover” by means of a rigorous spiritual discipline, but rather something one exercises constantly. Freedom did not exist before history (in some Gnostic aeon of perfection), but actualizes itself in a passage through time.

Freedom is not a "datum," a given, or a neutral faculty. It is not the mere ability to make choices. It is not a faculty whose morality one can only assess after it has been exercised. It is fundamentally the achievement of one's own person. By acting freely, one actualizes oneself.

B. Freedom as the Faculty of Final and Definitive Validity (III.1.B, p. 95). It is a misunderstanding to assert that freedom is merely the capacity to do this or that, as if one decision has no bearing on the second decision. Rather, every decision conditions the next decision. Freedom is the capacity to do something definitive. Every act of freedom makes the achievement of one’s life ever more final. Freedom is the capacity to achieve one’s own self. It is the capacity to establish “the eternity which we ourselves are and are becoming” (96). Every act contributes to the sum of who we are.

C. Transcendental Freedom and Its Categorical Objectifications (III.1.C, p. 96). Freedom is an element of every human being, but it cannot be fully known or objectified. We can reflect upon it, and so make it a theme for thought. But even then it never becomes wholly an object. The very reflection on freedom is an exercise of it. We cannot define it without using the term as an implicit element of the definition.

Whenever the human being acts, he or she experiences freedom. But that freedom is never absolute. Freedom is subject to necessity. Whenever we act, we experience our freedom as limited. One consequence is that we can never be sure of the moral quality of our actions. Why not? Because our actions are "a synthesis of original freedom and imposed necessity" (97). Our intentions alone do not determine the moral quality of our actions, and our intention to do good may nevertheless result in evil. That is why the attitude of "obedience," of listening to and of discerning God's self-communication, is so important.

To read the remainder of this text, please order the printed version of The Foundations of Karl Rahner by Mark F. Fischer, published in 2005 by Crossroad Publishing (ISBN 0824523423).