Chapter Four: Man as the Event of God's Free and Forgiving Self-Communication

The self-communication of God is transcendent. It transcends all of the tangible means in history by which we have known God, such as holy people, places, and things. God cannot be contained by them. If not, then how do we know God? We know God when God communicates, that is, gives to us the divine self. The gift takes place in the human being, the person who is the "event" of God's call. When God gives people a share in the divine self, God not only frees them to respond. God also offers forgiveness. God forgives in the ever-renewed offer of a relationship with God.

Scanned photo by Adolf Waschel of Vienna, published on p. 17 of Karl Rahner, I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview with Meinold Krauss, translated by Harvey D. Egan, S.J. (New York: Crossroad, 1985).

Chapter IV elaborates this argument in four parts. In the brief first part, Rahner clears up two misconceptions. One is that God's gift to human beings is a thing, i.e., a message or revelation about God. No, says Rahner, God offers human beings a share in the divine life. The second misconception is that God's gift of self is either a historical event or a transcendental experience. Rahner states that God's communication with human beings is both. The historical gospel invites us to respond, and our response enables us to transcend who we were before. How does the transcendent God communicate the divine life to human beings? This is the topic of Part 2. God communicates by becoming "immediate" to us. In our own experience - our experience of self-reflection, self-knowledge, and self-transcendence - we recognize God as the one who calls and supports us. Recognizing our incompleteness, we long for something to fill our emptiness. God's love, says Rahner (p. 124), "creates the emptiness which it wants freely to fill." God fills the emptiness by inviting and enabling human beings to make free and responsible choices. In this way, God forms a relationship with humanity. In Part 3, Rahner states that God's gift of self takes the form of a "supernatural existential." It is an existential because it is an offer to everyone. Every person is ordained to communion with God. Yet God's self-gift is supernatural. It is supernatural because communion with God would be impossible had God not given us the capacity for it. We who open ourselves to this gift experience it as forgiveness. The acceptance of God's constant offer of a relationship overcomes the guilt of the past. God's own life is the source of our new life. In Part 4 of the chapter, Rahner shows the relationship between the human being and the Trinitarian God. The language of "one God in three persons" is difficult to grasp because it suggests three individuals with their own inner life. This "immanent Trinity" is not the completely hidden inner life of God, but is identical to the Trinity of the economy of salvation. We view God "economically," that is, as active in history. The history of God, who reveals divinity in three persons and unites it with humanity, is the history of salvation.

Part 1: Preliminary Remarks

(IV.1, p. 116). Rahner’s preliminary remarks have to do first with the nature of self-communication as the giving of God’s own self. Secondly, they have to do with the unity between the historical and the transcendental in this communication. God communicates not only in mighty deeds, prophetical individuals, the words of Scripture and the traditions of the Church. God also communicates in the intimate call of the conscience and of freedom.

A. On the Notion of "Self-Communication" (IV.1.A, p. 116). When we say that God communicates with us, we do not mean that God says something “about” the divine self. We mean rather that God gives the divine self to human beings. “God in his own most proper reality,” says Rahner, “makes himself the innermost constitutive element of man” (116). God gives the divine to us and makes it essential to our very identity. This does not mean, however, that God is an element or a thing. The communication is a spiritual one, known to us through, for example, the call of conscience.

B. Starting Point in the Christian Message (IV.1.B, p. 117). When we speak of God’s self-communication, are we speaking of an historical event? Do we mean, for example, God’s revelation to Abraham, and prophetic oracles, and the Incarnation? Or are we speaking of a “transcendental” communication, that is, the experience of God’s call and our desire to respond and hence to transcend ourselves (as Rahner described in I.4 and in II.2)? Rahner says that he means both.
God’s self-communication takes place historically and transcendentally. On the one hand, we have a specifically Christian interpretation of God’s communication to us. It is a communication that has been given in history and handed down in Christian tradition. On the other hand, God’s communication is just a starting point. Having received it in history, we respond to it. Christians are invited to accept or reject the offer of transcendence in the tradition we have received. God’s self-communication always has this twofold structure – a historical medium and a transcendent invitation to respond.

Part 2: What Does the "Self-Communication of God" Mean?

(IV.2, p. 117). In this section, Rahner explains the ways in which God communicates. In the first place, he insists that God communicates not by sending a message, but by forming a relationship (A). The relationship consists of God’s invitation and our response (B). We know God as the one who created us and who invites us to transcend our present situation, thereby realizing the possibilities that existence offers (C). God not only gives us these possibilities, but enables us to receive them and so becomes a gift which we can receive (D). Like parents who give their life to their child, God gives the divine life to us (E). This life is more than the simple capacity to hear God’s call; it is also a transformation and a capacity to love as God loves (F). No doubt, this capacity is part of our human nature; but it is created freely by God, not “owed” or deducible by means of a system of logic (G). The offer of the divine self is not something added to human nature, but is the satisfaction of the very hunger God has created (H). The Scriptures speak of this as the ability to be a child of God and a dwelling place of the Spirit (I). Our response is to accept the offer in gratitude and to surrender to the one who makes the offer (J).

A. Grace of Justification and the "Beatific Vision" (IV.2.A, p. 117). The human being, says Rahner, is “the event of God’s absolute and forgiving self-communication” (117). For Christians, the person is not primarily an animate body, or even an eternal soul, but rather an event. The event is a relationship with God. God gives us the divine self. Why? For the sake of our ability to know God and to possess God. How does this happen? It happens in the immediacy of experience, i.e., our experience of transcendence, freedom, responsibility, and love.

In this event, the person experiences what Christian tradition calls the "grace of justification" and the "beatific vision." What is the beatific vision? In Christian tradition, it is the immediate encounter with God after death. But Rahner gives it a this-worldly interpretation. He calls it the fulfillment of our divinization. Divinization is a term from Greek Patrology. It traditionally refers to the fullness of the Christian experience, the fullness of being alive, not in myself, but Christ living in me. For Rahner, divinization is the experience of grace par excellence. Grace divinizes the human being for the sake of the final goal of the beatific vision. It raises the person to the possibility of transcendence.

B. The Twofold Modality of God's Self-Communication (IV.2.B, p. 118). There are two ways or modes by which God communicates the divine self. One is the offer and call of God to human freedom. It is God’s invitation to transcendence. The other is our human response. Our ability to respond is a “permanent existential,” a constituent part of who we are as human creatures of God.

From this twofold self-communication, three consequences flow. One is our acceptance of God's offer, based on what God grants in the offer itself (namely, the ability to hear the divine call and respond to it). The second consequence or proviso is that we do not misinterpret the divine self-communication. We must not interpret it as something created, such as a set of conditions we must meet on our own initiative. Even our acceptance of God's offer must be enabled and borne by God. The third consequence is that God empowers our very freedom. Although we can speak of "our" freedom, nevertheless that freedom comes from God as a gift.

C. God's Self-Communication and Abiding Presence as Mystery (IV.2.C, p. 119). “Man is the event of God’s absolute self-communication,” says Rahner. The meaning of “event” was treated in 2.A above. But how can God give us the divine self without turning that self into an object like any other? How can God be “present” without becoming a thing? The answer is that God is present as the “term” of transcendence. This means that we know God as we know ourselves, in the intimate experience of freedom to choose and in the call to act responsibly. Hence God, present as the “term of transcendence,” is both the incalculably remote creator and ground of being and the intimately close conscience and call of freedom. The “term” (our transcendence) and the “object” (the divine being) coincide. So God communicates the divine self without ceasing to be divine. The original horizon of being is also our object of worship.

D. The Giver Himself Is the Gift (IV.2.D, p. 120). This paragraph explains how God can be both the giver and the gift itself. God is the cause of all things. And when God communicates with us, we are changed. God’s gift of self becomes a part of our very being. The divine cause becomes a principle of the human effect. We become what God gives.

E. The Model of Formal Causality (IV.2.D, p. 120). The language of Thomistic metaphysics proves helpful here. God’s relation to us is an example, Rahner says, of “formal” causality. The very principle of God’s being becomes constitutive of who we are. Example: the generation of children by their parents is “formal” causality. In causing children, the “principle” of the parents becomes a part of the children. This must be distinguished from “efficient” causality. In efficient causality (e.g., a bat striking a baseball), the effect differs from the cause (the bat does not become a part of the ball).

God "causes" us in that God communicates the divine self to us. But when we receive the gift of God, God does not thereby lose the divine self. God does not cause or produce something different from the divine self. Rather, God becomes a constitutive element in the fulfillment of the creature. Our "justification" by God is not something God does apart from us. It is rather the orientation of human beings, an orientation accomplished by God, to the absolute and divine mystery.

F. God's Self-Communication for the Sake of Immediate Knowledge and Love (IV.2.F, p. 122). What do we mean when we speak of God’s self-communication? We mean that God becomes “immediate” to us. We know God through our own experience, through our own knowledge of ourselves. We know ourselves as the recipients and beneficiaries of God’s call and as persons who desire to respond to it. Then God becomes immediate as the spiritual unity, the fundamental unity, of knowledge and love: knowledge of God who calls to us, love of God who asks us to respond.

The fact that we are created means that God is our "efficient cause." But efficient causality is a deficient mode of God's self-communication. There is more to God's self-communication than the fact of creation. God is also, in Jesus Christ, selfless love incarnate. God's love for us, expressed in the life and death of Jesus, spills over from us to other persons. God communicates, not just by making us able to hear and respond to God's call, but by giving the divine self to us.

G. The Absolute Gratuity of God's Self-Communication (IV.2.G, p. 123). Because God acts in freedom, we cannot claim that we merit the gift of the divine self. Some may argue that, because God created all human beings with the capacity to hear and respond to God, this potential is part of our human nature, and is not grace. But no, says Rahner, it is freely given. And it is “supernatural,” not merely natural. Why not? Because God’s gift of the divine self to human beings is added to nature, and cannot be deduced by means of logic.

H. Gratuitous Does Not Mean Extrinsic (IV.2.H, p. 123). Although God communicates freely, the self-communication is not “extrinsic” or “accidental.” God does not choose to communicate to some, and not to others. The divine gift of self is more than a “super-nature” added to the merely human “nature” of a select few. And God is not indifferent to us. The divine self-communication cannot be reduced to a mere capacity for decision-making casually bestowed on all. Why? Because God creates in us an emptiness, a hunger for God, in order to fill it. God is love and does not want to remain alone with the divine self. Instead, says Rahner, God creates an emptiness that God wants to fill.

I. Remarks on the Church's Teaching (IV.2.I, p. 124). There are numerous Scriptures that foreshadow the doctrine of transcendental self-communication. The NT speaks of human beings becoming children of God, of the Spirit of God dwelling in us as in a temple, of our participation in God’s own nature, of the hope of seeing God face to face, and of the seed of justification we now possess and which will bear much fruit. All of these suggest that God has become “immediate” (see II.5.B) through the mediation of our own self. In contrast, there are other mediations that do not make God present. The NT refers to these when it speaks of “principalities and powers,” i.e., the many mediations which are not God.

J. Christianity as the Religion of Immediacy to God in His Self-Communication (IV.2.J, p. 125). Christianity surpasses every other religion, Rahner says, because in Christianity God is immediate. God does not give some “numinous, mysterious gift which is different from himself, but . . . gives himself.” This suggests that we are to surrender to God’s “holy and ineffable mystery,” to “accept it in freedom,” and to allow it to become for us “in faith, hope and love.”

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).